Let us be straight about this one from the start: Music Library Tools cannot move a Rekordbox library into Serato yet. If that is what you came here for, this page will tell you how to do it by hand and what to expect, rather than sell you something that does not do the job.
It is on the roadmap. It is not something you can download today.
Why this direction is the hard one
Going Serato to Rekordbox is a solved problem. Going back is not, and the reason is where each program keeps your work.
Serato stores your cue points inside your music files. Anything that can read the files can read the cues, which is why moving a Serato library into Rekordbox can bring your cue points with it.
Rekordbox keeps everything in its own library instead — cues, playlists, grids, all of it held separately from the audio. Your music files come out clean, which means the work you did in Rekordbox does not travel with them.
So it is not the same job in reverse. It is a different job, which is why it is taking longer.
The manual method
This gets your music and your playlist structure across. It does not get your cue points across — nothing reliably does.
1. Get your playlists out of Rekordbox as folders
In Rekordbox, export each playlist to a folder on disk, one folder per playlist. If you have a deep folder structure, mirror it as you go — it is much easier to keep it now than to rebuild it in Serato later.
This is the slow part, and there is no way around it. Start with the playlists you actually play rather than the whole library.
2. Import the folders into Serato
Open Serato and drag each folder into the crates panel. Serato creates a crate per folder and analyses the tracks as it goes, building its own beatgrids and waveforms.
3. Re-cue what you play
Your cue points are the part you have to redo. The realistic approach is not to re-cue the whole library — it is to re-cue the tracks you actually pull out, as you pull them out, over the first few weeks. Painful in the abstract, manageable in practice.
What you keep and what you lose
| Comes across? | |
|---|---|
| Your music files | Yes |
| Playlists as crates | Yes, if you export folder by folder |
| Folder structure | Yes, if you mirror it manually |
| Track tags | Yes — they live in the files |
| Hot cues and memory cues | No |
| Loops | No |
| Beatgrids | No — Serato analyses the tracks itself |
| Star ratings and colours | No |
Once you are in Serato
Two things are worth doing straight after a move like this, because a hand-built import tends to leave the same mess every time.
Check for duplicates. Exporting playlists from Rekordbox often produces multiple copies of tracks that appeared in several playlists. Find Duplicates matches on the audio rather than the filename, so it catches copies even when the names and bitrates differ. Scanning is free, so you can see the scale of it before deciding to do anything.
Back it up. Once you have rebuilt crates and started re-cueing, that work only exists in one place. Backup keeps a restorable copy, and restoring is free.
Going the other way
If you are actually heading Serato to Rekordbox — for CDJ gigs, say — that direction is fully supported and keeps your cue points. See how to move your music from Serato to Rekordbox.
And if you are running both libraries side by side rather than migrating, Sync is built for exactly that: Serato stays the library you maintain, and Rekordbox gets kept up to date from it.
Rekordbox to Serato is on the roadmap. Until it ships, this is the honest method. Download Music Library Tools if the duplicate clean-up or the backup afterwards would be useful — both work today.