How to · Rekordbox

Manage hot cue colors in Rekordbox.

Rekordbox lets you assign a distinct color to each hot cue slot, making drops, breakdowns, and phrase markers instantly readable on CDJs and in your prep view. Set them once and they travel to your players.

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Rekordbox waveform view showing colored hot cue markers

Color-coded hot cues let you read track structure at a glance on any CDJ or XDJ.

Manage hot cue colors in Rekordbox, step by step.

Rekordbox 7.x lets you color each of the eight hot cue slots independently from within Export mode or Performance mode. Changes save to your library and export to USB for CDJs automatically.

Open a track in the waveform editor

In Export mode, click a track in your collection to select it, then double-click it (or use the Edit mode browser) to load it into the waveform editor. Make sure the Hot Cue panel is visible on the upper right side of the screen. Hot cue controls appear in two places: the horizontal Cue/Loop bar in the middle of the screen, and the Hot Cue list on the upper right panel. Export mode is the primary view for setting and coloring cue points.

Set or select a hot cue point

Navigate to the position in the track where you want to place or edit a cue. Click an empty Hot Cue pad in the Cue/Loop bar to set a new point at the current playhead position, or click an existing colored pad to select it. The cue point entry highlights in the Hot Cue list on the right panel.

Change the cue color

Right-click the hot cue pad (the colored square with the cue number) or right-click its entry in the Hot Cue list and choose the color swatch you want from the color picker that appears. Rekordbox offers a palette of 16 preset colors. You can also reset to the default color scheme. The pad and the waveform marker update immediately to reflect your choice.

Export to USB or sync your library via Pro DJ Link

In Export mode, drag your playlist or collection to a connected USB drive and Rekordbox writes the cue colors alongside positions and names. To sync to connected CDJs and XDJs over a network, use Pro DJ Link - connect your players and laptop to the same network switch via Ethernet. Link Export is a separate USB cable method for specific units (XDJ-RX/RX2) that lets you access your library directly without a USB drive, but it is not a real-time network color sync feature. Either path preserves every color assignment exactly as you set it.

The catch

Coloring cues track by track is accurate but slow for large libraries. If you re-analyze or reimport tracks, cue data can be overwritten, requiring manual re-entry.

bass

mids

highs

lead

intro

verse

buildup

drop

breakdown

outro

The faster way

Let Vibes push your cue points in bulk, colors included.

Vibes analyzes your tracks and auto-generates cue points tied to detected sections like intros, drops, breakdowns, and outros, then writes them directly into your Rekordbox database via SQLCipher. Colors and positions land in Rekordbox without you touching a single pad.

See how it works

Auto cue point detection places markers at structurally meaningful moments: intro, buildup, drop, breakdown, outro.

Exports cue point type metadata so each marker carries the correct color and label when it lands in Rekordbox.

Writes directly to master.db via SQLCipher, falling back to XML, so cue data appears in Rekordbox without a manual import step.

Process your entire library in one export pass rather than opening and coloring tracks one at a time.

Organize in Vibes, export to Rekordbox.

Your playlists, tags, ratings, and cue points travel back to the gear you play on, so nothing you do in Vibes is locked away.

Track 001

Artist A

128

Afterhours

Mysterious

Introspective

Track 002

Artist B

124

Cozy Floor

Peaceful

Home

Track 003

Artist C

132

Rave

Aggressive

Festival

Build & Release

Playlists

Vibes

Mood

Aggressive

Euphoric

Melancholic

Mysterious

Peaceful

Playful

Tense

Function

Arrangement

Sets

Club Night 12/28

NYE Closing Set

Rooftop 01/04

Frequently asked questions

The honest answers, including the trade-offs.

Partially. Vibes generates and exports cue points with type metadata that maps to colors in Rekordbox, which removes most of the manual work. However, if you want to fine-tune a specific cue color by hand after the fact, you still do that inside Rekordbox itself. Think of Vibes as the bulk-prep layer and Rekordbox as the finishing step.

Vibes writes cue points as part of its export. If you have existing cues you want to keep, review your Vibes export settings before running a sync. The safest workflow is to let Vibes set the structural cues first, then add any personal touch-up cues inside Rekordbox afterward.

Yes. Rekordbox stores color data alongside cue position and name in the library database. When you export a playlist or collection to a USB drive in Export mode, the color assignments are included and display correctly on Pioneer CDJ and XDJ players.

Methodology