Getting a new laptop should be a good day. Then you remember your entire library is on the old one, and that every crate you have built since you started DJing is not something you can drag across in a folder.
It is a straightforward move if you do it in the right order. Here is what has to come with you, what usually gets left behind, and how to check you are actually ready before the old machine goes.
What has to come across
Three things, and only one of them is obvious.
Your music. The files themselves. Everyone remembers these.
Your crates and playlists. Serato keeps these separately from your music. Copy your tracks across on their own and the new laptop has your entire collection with no crates at all — which is somehow worse than starting fresh, because you know exactly what you have lost.
Your cue points. These sit inside the music files, so they come with the audio. Move the files properly and your cues arrive with them.
The mistake almost everyone makes is moving the first one and assuming the rest follows.
The order to do it in
1. Back up the old machine first
Before anything else, take a full backup while you still have the working library in front of you. Backup copies your crates, playlists, library data and the tracks they point at as one restorable set. Put it on an external drive rather than the laptop you are about to stop using.
This is also your undo button. If something goes sideways on the new machine, you have not lost anything.
2. Set up the new machine
Install Serato and Music Library Tools on the new laptop. Do not start importing music by hand — you are about to bring the whole library across in one move, and half-importing first only makes a mess to untangle.
3. Restore
Restore is free in MLT. Point it at your backup and it shows you what it will bring back before it writes anything — what is coming across, what is already there, and what it will leave alone. Then it rebuilds your crate structure on the new machine rather than dropping a pile of tracks into a folder.
Your cue points come back with the files, so your library arrives the way you left it.
4. Open Serato and check
Before you wipe anything, open Serato on the new laptop and look:
- are your crates there, in the folders you had them in?
- pick a few tracks across different crates — do the cue points look right?
- does anything show as missing?
5. Only then clear the old machine
Keep the old laptop or the backup drive intact until you have played out from the new one at least once. Nothing exposes a bad migration like a gig.
If tracks show up missing afterwards
This is the most common thing to go wrong, and it is usually not a real loss. Serato is looking for files where they used to be, and on a new machine the paths often changed — a different username, a different drive letter, an external that mounted somewhere else.
Missing Tracks scans your drives, finds where the files actually live now, and relinks them without touching your cue points. It is far quicker than re-importing and it keeps the crates you have just restored intact.
Tidy up before you move, not after
Switch does not move your library between computers — Backup and Restore do that. What it does is get everything on the old machine into one place first, which makes the move far less painful.
If your music is scattered across Desktop, Downloads and three different externals, your backup has to reach into every one of those locations, and anything sitting on a drive you forget to plug in simply does not come with you. Switch maps out where every file actually lives, funnels it all into a single folder and updates Serato’s paths as it goes, so what you back up is one tidy folder rather than an archaeology dig.
Run it before step 1, not after step 5.
The short version
Back up, install, restore, check, then wipe. The order matters more than the tools do — the people who lose their library are almost always the ones who cleared the old machine before opening Serato on the new one.
Backup and Restore are part of Music Library Tools — one payment, no subscription, Mac and Windows. Restoring is free. Download MLT on both machines before you start.