You have years of crates in Serato and a gig on CDJs. Or you are moving to Rekordbox properly and you do not want to rebuild the whole library by hand. Either way the job is the same: move your music from Serato to Rekordbox and keep the work you have already done.
This guide covers how to do it, and — the part most articles skip — exactly which parts of your library survive the move and which ones Rekordbox has to work out for itself.
Why you cannot just export Serato crates into Rekordbox
Serato and Rekordbox do not share a library format, and there is no import button that bridges them.
Serato stores your crates in its own format, and keeps your cue points inside the music files themselves. Rekordbox ignores all of it and keeps everything — tracks, playlists, cues, beatgrids — in a library of its own.
So exporting a crate out of Serato gives you a file Rekordbox cannot open. The usual workaround is to drag each crate into a folder and import the folders into Rekordbox, which gets your music in but loses every cue point you have ever set. On a 3,000-track library, re-cueing by hand is a few weekends of work.
The only thing that actually works is a tool that reads Serato and writes into Rekordbox for you. That is what MLT Sync does.
How MLT Sync moves your music from Serato to Rekordbox
Sync is one of the tools inside Music Library Tools. It reads your Serato crates and puts them straight into Rekordbox — there is no file to export and nothing to import afterwards. You open Rekordbox and your crates are already there.
Here is how it goes.
1. Point it at both libraries
Sync finds your Serato and Rekordbox libraries on its own, on Mac and on Windows. If you keep your library on an external drive, you can point it at the right place yourself.
2. Pick your crates
You get your full crate list, including crate folders and smart crates. Tick the ones you want. You do not have to move everything in one go — most people start with the crates they actually play.
3. Compare
Before anything is written, Sync checks each Serato crate against Rekordbox and marks it Synced or Not Synced. It is not just counting tracks — it looks at the tracks, titles, artists and cue points, so a crate that has everything but has had its cues moved is flagged rather than waved through. Folders add their crates up, so you get “19 Synced, 2 Not Synced” at a glance.
That is what makes this something you can live with long term rather than a one-time import. The next time you run it, it only deals with what changed.
4. Sync
Rekordbox has to be closed while your library is written to, so Sync closes it for you — including the part of Rekordbox that keeps running in the background after you close the window, which is usually why “but I did quit Rekordbox” is not enough on its own.
Then it works through three steps, which is exactly what you see on screen:
- Checking your library — working out what is already in Rekordbox.
- Adding tracks — bringing in each new track with its tags and cue points.
- Building playlists — creating the playlists and filing your tracks into them.
5. Open Rekordbox
Your crates are in a folder called MLT at the top of your Rekordbox playlists, with your crate folders kept the way you had them. Playlists you built in Rekordbox yourself are left alone.
What actually transfers from Serato to Rekordbox
This is the honest table. Some of it is better than you would expect and some of it is not.
| Transfers? | Detail | |
|---|---|---|
| Crates → playlists | Yes | Every Serato crate becomes a Rekordbox playlist inside the MLT folder |
| Crate folders | Yes | Your folder structure is rebuilt in Rekordbox |
| Smart crates | Mostly | They stay smart in Rekordbox rather than freezing — see below |
| Crate order | Yes | Sorted to match Serato at the end of every sync |
| Hot cues | Yes | Your Serato cues become Rekordbox hot cues, in order, in the closest matching colour |
| Track info | Yes | Artist, title, album, genre, year, key, label, comments and the rest of your tags |
| Your music files | Not copied | Rekordbox points at the same files you already have — nothing is duplicated and nothing moves |
| Loops | No | Saved loops do not come across. Cue points do |
| Memory cues | No | Everything arrives as a hot cue |
| Star ratings and colours | No | Not carried over |
| Beatgrids and waveforms | No | Rekordbox works these out itself the first time it sees a track |
Smart crates
This is the part that surprises people. A Serato smart crate does not arrive as a frozen list of today’s tracks — it stays smart in Rekordbox and keeps filling itself. Run Sync again later and it recognises the ones it already made instead of creating duplicates.
The catch is that Serato and Rekordbox do not offer quite the same set of rules. The common ones — artist, album, track name, genre, key, BPM, label, comments, when you added it — all carry over. A more unusual rule may not have a Rekordbox equivalent, and it gets left out rather than guessed at. The playlist is still created, so it is worth opening a complicated smart crate in Rekordbox and checking it does what you expect.
Hot cues
Your cues come across in the order they appear in the track, so your first cue becomes A. If a track already has cues in Rekordbox, syncing replaces them rather than mixing the two sets together — which is what you want when Serato is the library you actually keep up to date, but worth knowing if you have been cueing in Rekordbox as well.
Beatgrids
No tool can hand Rekordbox a Serato beatgrid. Rekordbox will not use a grid it did not make itself, so nothing is written and it is left to do its own analysis. Let it run through your tracks after a sync and it will build its own grids and waveforms. If you had hand-corrected grids in Serato for tricky tracks, those are the ones worth checking.
File types
MP3, WAV, AIFF, FLAC and M4A all come across. Very occasionally a track arrives with everything except its cue points, or gets missed and picks up on the next run — a handful of files in a big library, not something that happens across the board. It is why the count at the end of a sync is worth a glance.
Keeping Serato and Rekordbox in sync afterwards
Most DJs are not really migrating — they are running both. Serato at home, Rekordbox for CDJ gigs. That is what Compare is for.
Add music to Serato as normal. Next time you open Sync, hit Compare and any crate that has moved on is marked Not Synced with a count of what is missing. Sync those and you are level again. Tracks already in Rekordbox are recognised rather than added twice, and if you have re-cued something there is an option to push your current Serato cues onto tracks that are already over there.
One thing that catches people out: if you only reorder your crates in Serato, nothing about the tracks has actually changed, so Compare rightly says everything matches and there is nothing to sync. That is what Match Serato Order is for — it just puts your Rekordbox playlists back in your Serato order, in seconds, without touching a single track.
Does it work the other way — Rekordbox to Serato?
No. Sync goes one way, Serato to Rekordbox. Going the other way is a genuinely different job rather than the same one in reverse, which is why it is not simply a toggle.
It is on the roadmap. Until then it means doing it by hand — how to move your music from Rekordbox to Serato walks through the manual method and what you keep along the way.
Before you start: back up
You are writing to your Rekordbox library, so back up your Serato library first and let Rekordbox make its own backup next time it opens. It takes a minute and it means a bad run costs you nothing.
Sync is part of Music Library Tools — one payment, no subscription, Mac and Windows. The free version does three transfers a month, so you can download it and move a couple of real crates across before you decide anything.