It was designed for users of Traktor, the DJ software from Native Instruments. It is a central hub that lets the leading DJ programs exchange playlists, and the hundreds of hours of work it takes to build them.
It imports your collections into Traktor, and it takes your Traktor collection out to the other programs and to Pioneer CDJ players. It is a true Swiss army knife for managing your music.
No. It is not a DJ program. It does not mix, it has no effects and it does not replace Traktor or any other program it connects. It works alongside them and gives them one more way to share your work.
Because I wanted a simple tool, easy to use on any operating system, to take my playlists to the CDJs.
DJs who own CDJs paid for that hardware. They should be able to play the playlists they built, sometimes over several years, in another program, without redoing them.
Pioneer's newer open library formats are made for its recent players. The CDJ-2000NXS2 is a player that still performs very well, and it reads the rekordbox USB export format. Traktor Bridge writes that format.
It was designed for Traktor users, and it reads other programs too. The name comes from the first version, which was made for Traktor only. It now reads Mixxx, VirtualDJ, Serato, rekordbox XML and any M3U playlist as well, and it also works on its own.
No, and it is not meant to. Traktor Bridge sits between Traktor, other DJ programs and the CDJ players.
Traktor, rekordbox, VirtualDJ, Serato and Mixxx are complete programs for mixing, effects, analysis and large libraries. Traktor Bridge does the part in between.
No. Open a music folder or a plain M3U playlist, build your playlists, reorganise them, place hot cues, memory cues and loops, then export to a CDJ key. Nothing else is needed.
Press a key A to H in the playlist editor. It sets a hot cue at the needle, whether the track is playing or not. Press the key again to play from the cue.
You can also drag the letter of a cue on the waveform to move it in real time. Shift snaps it to the beat grid. Esc, or releasing the mouse far outside the waveform, cancels the move, and Ctrl+Z undoes it.
The cue editor adds exact times, names, slots, loop length and one-click 4-beat loops. A right click on a pad makes a 1, 2, 4 or 8 beat loop. Hot cues have colours that the CDJ shows.
Yes. File > Save the project writes your playlists, folders, track order, paths, cues, beat grids and export settings in one JSON file. File > Open project / collection brings everything back.
Yes. Loops are written as memory loops and as hot loops. Hot loops and the colours of hot cues need a CDJ-2000NXS2, a CDJ-3000 or a recent XDJ. Older players show them as memory loops.
Yes. The Format button turns any USB key or SD card into a FAT32 drive the CDJ and XDJ read, whatever it was before (Mac, Linux, NTFS, exFAT, GPT, more than 32 GB). Only removable drives are listed, never your system disk. The program asks for a confirmation before erasing.
As reliable as I could make it.
The audio is hashed (SHA-256) while it is copied. Then the key is read back from the drive itself, not from the system cache, and every file is compared with its source.
The checksums stay on the key, so Tools > Verify an export can check it again later, before a gig for example.
Files are written under a temporary name and renamed, so a cut never leaves a half-written file. Tracks already on the key are skipped, and a damaged copy is rewritten by the next export. When the export is finished, the program offers to eject the key safely.
They stay. When the key already holds playlists, the program lists them and asks: Keep them and
add this export (the default) or Replace everything on the key. A playlist with the same name
is replaced by the new one. Before the database is replaced, the old one is saved next to it as
export.pdb.tb-bak.
Versions up to 3.5.1 wrote a new database at every export, so the playlists of an earlier export were no longer listed on the player, although their audio stayed on the key. Export them again with 3.5.2 and they are listed. File > Open a CDJ USB key loads the playlists of a key like a collection, and never writes to it.
A CDJ can update the database and analysis files on a key. If you verify the key later with Tools > Verify an export, those Pioneer files are reported as modified, with integrity unconfirmed. They are not counted as damaged, because a changed checksum cannot say who made the change.
Changed audio or artwork, and missing or unreadable files, are still reported as problems.
If you export again to a key a player has used, the program says how many analysis files it kept were changed since, and leaves them as they are. That is not an error.
Back up the key before you export to it again. The new export replaces what the player changed.
No. Your audio, playlists, cues and metadata stay on your computer. There is no telemetry, no account and no automatic upload of logs. Loading, editing, backup and export work offline.
The source code is public, so you can check. A log you share yourself may contain file paths and track names, so read it first.
No. Tools > Verify audio files looks for damaged files. It reads the headers (Quick) or decodes the whole stream (Full), and it changes nothing.
It can tell you whether ClamAV is installed, and that is all. It does not run it. For an antivirus scan, install ClamAV or use your own antivirus, keep it up to date and scan your music folder outside Traktor Bridge.
No antivirus catches everything, and Traktor Bridge has no detector for steganography in MP3 files.
Yes. The cue points from Traktor, for example, are kept and the CDJ uses them. No more hours spent setting your cues again.
Yes. The analysis and the export use several cores and buffered processing.
Traktor Bridge is not built for live playback, so it can use the machine hard and be tuned for one job: processing the tracks, generating the waveforms and exporting to USB. On a USB key, the speed of the key itself becomes the limit.
Yes, it is written in Python. There is a portable build for Windows, and it runs from source on macOS and Linux. I use Linux myself, and this kind of tool was missing there.
Not by studying the players or their firmware, but by research and trial and error on exported keys: export, compare the files, test on a player, start again.
Traktor Bridge is written from scratch. I started from the research published by Deep Symmetry (crate-digger, beat-link) and by the openboxxx project, then from everything else I could find on the rekordbox formats. Their work made this possible. I exported keys with rekordbox to get golden samples, and rebuilt each file format from the documents that agreed with each other.
Then I ran tens, then hundreds of differential comparisons, byte by byte, until my files matched rekordbox's where the players care. I also looked at the network traffic of the players, the IP layer and the Pro DJ Link data. It tells a lot about what a player reads and when.
Public sources do not always agree, and some are out of date or incomplete. More than once a document I trusted turned out to be wrong, and some texts written by AI tools read convincingly and are not reliable. I kept only what several sources agreed on and checked it on real keys.
My own analysis tools, written in Python so they run on any system: parsers for the rekordbox files, a differential comparator and a USB key validator. They only ever looked at data, the files rekordbox writes on a key, never at program code.
It is an interoperability tool, built the way European law allows. This is my understanding, not legal advice.
File formats are not protected by copyright: the Court of Justice of the EU ruled in 2012 (SAS Institute v World Programming, C-406/10) that the functionality of a program and the format of its data files are not protected. Writing files a CDJ can read is interoperability, not copying.
The lawful user of a program may observe, study and test how it works (Directive 2009/24/EC, article 5.3), and a licence cannot take that right away (article 8). Exporting keys with rekordbox and comparing the files is exactly that. No program was decompiled.
The brand names are only used to say what Traktor Bridge is compatible with.
It is validated on the CDJ-2000NXS2: loading, browsing, playback, waveforms, beatgrid, cues and artwork. Players that read rekordbox 6 USB exports should read it too, the CDJ-3000 without its HD waveforms.
It counts visits, and it does it without tracking you. There is no cookie and no third-party script. Your IP address is not stored: it only feeds a one-way hash that changes every day, so nobody can be followed from one day to the next. The country is guessed from the time zone of your browser, never from your address.
The counter records the pages read, the site you came from, and the clicks on the download buttons and on links that leave the site. The data is deleted after 400 days. The program itself sends nothing at all.
Yes, and it stays free for personal, educational and any other noncommercial use. It is a non-commercial project, made in my free time. The source code is public, everyone is free to read it.
The program is provided as is, without warranty. I am not responsible for any loss of data or other damage. Keep backups of your collection and your music, remember that formatting a key erases it, and test your key on a player before a gig.
If you find a problem, tell me on GitHub with the log (Ctrl+L).
Traktor Bridge