How to · Serato DJ

Use one library on two laptops with Serato DJ.

A Serato library on two computers has to travel with you: Serato keeps its database in a _Serato_ folder next to your music, and it writes another one to the root of any external drive you have added tracks from. So the clean setup is one external drive holding the music and the crates, or a full copy of the _Serato_ folder plus the Library folder onto the second laptop, finished with Rescan ID3 Tags and Relocate Lost Files.

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Use one library on two laptops in Serato DJ, step by step.

There are two routes and they solve different problems. A travel drive gives you the same crates on any Serato laptop. Copying the folders gives a second machine a full library of its own.

01

Back up the _Serato_ folder before you touch anything

Close Serato. The folder lives at Users > your name > Music > _Serato_, the same path on macOS and Windows. Copy it to another drive before you move anything. Serato may also offer to back up when you quit, which creates a _Serato_Backup folder, but only one backup is kept and each new one overwrites it.

02

Format the travel drive so Serato can write to it

Check the drive with Get Info on macOS or Properties on Windows. macOS cannot write to NTFS and Windows cannot read Mac OS Extended, and FAT32 works on both but caps single files at 4 GB. If Serato cannot write to the drive, cue points, loops and track overviews will not save.

03

Copy your music onto the drive from the Files panel

Open the Files panel with the Files button to the left of the search bar. Select the tracks, drag them onto the drive in the panel, and pick Copy or Move. Move repoints your library and crates at the new location, Copy leaves them on the originals. Keep everything under one root folder.

04

Drag the crates across as well

Crates and subcrates move the same way: select a crate in the Files panel, drag it onto the drive, and choose Copy. A progress bar appears below the Files panel, and the audio files travel with the crate. Smart crates are the exception, they cannot be transferred to a portable library.

05

Plug the drive into the second laptop

Mount the drive before you launch Serato, and your crates and music appear on that machine. Eject it and nothing is left behind. Two things to avoid: do not share the drive with a Time Machine backup, and do not run the library from a network share, because Serato does not support reading data from a network source.

06

Or load the second laptop in full

Copy three things: the _Serato_ folder from Music, the Library folder from Application Support > Serato on macOS or AppData > Local > Serato on Windows, and one folder with all your music. Rename anything already there first. Then open Serato, click Rescan ID3 Tags in the Files panel, and drag your music folder onto Relocate Lost Files.

The catch

Two loaded laptops drift apart the moment you edit on both. Serato is blunt about it: two _Serato_ databases cannot be fully merged, you can only build a new one that keeps most of the information by copying .crate files out of each Subcrates folder. Pick one machine as the master, or carry the drive.

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The faster way

Organize once, export a matching Serato library to each laptop.

Vibes reads your existing crates through the Import Wizard, and Smart Import detects the app for you. Tagging, BPM and key analysis, star ratings and set planning then live in one place instead of two databases. Vibes exports playlists and vibes back to Serato as a folder tree, with optional Camelot key or BPM sub-folders. There is no cloud sync between machines, so you run that export once per laptop.

See how it works

Import Wizard reads your Serato crates, and Smart Import detects the app automatically

Export playlists and vibes back to Serato as a folder tree, with optional Camelot key or BPM sub-folders

Duplicate finder with exact, metadata, and audio-similarity layers for the copies two machines always create

Auto-Tagging, star ratings, and energy 1 to 10 stay in one library, so both exports come out the same

Organize in Vibes, export to Serato DJ.

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

Frequently asked questions

The honest answers, including the trade-offs.

Move three things. The _Serato_ folder from your Music folder, which holds the database and your crates. The Library folder from Application Support > Serato on macOS or AppData > Local > Serato on Windows, which holds history, preferences and crate order. And one folder with all your music. Copy them to an external drive, put them in the same places on the new machine, then run Rescan ID3 Tags and relocate your files. Never rename the audio files.

In a folder called _Serato_ inside your user Music folder, on both macOS and Windows. Crates sit in the Subcrates folder as .crate files, smart crates in Smartcrates, recordings in Recording. Serato also creates a _Serato_ folder at the root of every external drive you have added music from, so check those too. History sessions, preferences and crate order live separately in Application Support > Serato or AppData > Local > Serato.

Crates are the playlists. Click Add Crate, then drag a crate slightly right onto another crate name to nest it as a subcrate. The include subcrate tracks option in Setup shows everything from the children in the parent. Smart crates fill themselves from rules on fields such as BPM, Key, Genre, Grouping or Year. In 4.0 you can right-click a crate and Add To Favorites to pin it to the top. More on crates and subcrates.

Close Serato and copy the _Serato_ folder from Music onto an external drive, and keep a second copy on your internal drive. Do the same for the _Serato_ folder on each external drive you play from, because each one holds the data for the tracks on that drive. Then copy your music folder. Serato's own quit prompt writes a _Serato_Backup folder, but it keeps one version only. Full walkthrough: back up your Serato library.

Close Serato first. Rename the existing _Serato_ folder in Music to something like _Serato_OLD rather than deleting it, then drop your backup copy in its place. Put the Library folder back into Application Support > Serato or AppData > Local > Serato, renaming any existing one. Open Serato, click Rescan ID3 Tags in the Files panel, and drag your music folder onto Relocate Lost Files so the paths match up again.

Open the Files panel, click the crate you want, and drag it onto the USB drive shown in that panel. Choose Copy at the prompt, not Move, and a progress bar appears below the panel. The audio files travel with the crate. Eject the drive properly, plug it into the other laptop, and the crate is there. Smart crates cannot be transferred to a portable library, so rebuild those or convert them to a normal crate first.

There is no export command for crates. A crate is a .crate file inside _Serato_ > Subcrates, and you move it by dragging it in the Files panel. History sessions do export properly: open the History panel, select a session, pick Serato Playlists, .txt, .csv or .m3u, and click export. The files land in a History Export folder inside your _Serato_ folder. See export your played history.

The drag is the easy part, the drive decides whether it works. Format it so Serato can write: FAT32 is readable on both systems but caps files at 4 GB, Mac OS Extended is invisible to Windows, and NTFS is read-only on macOS, which silently blocks cue points and loops from saving. On recent macOS versions you also have to grant Serato Files and Folders or Full Disk Access before it can reach an external drive.

In Music > _Serato_ > Recording, the same path on macOS and Windows. Click Rec Location in the recording panel to change it. A take you never named lands in Recording temp instead. WAV and AIFF files stop at 2 GB, so a long set continues into a second file. Because they sit inside _Serato_, recordings get copied along whenever you move that folder between laptops, which bloats the transfer. See record your set.

Usually one of five things. You copied the music but not the Subcrates folder. You left behind the _Serato_ folder that lives on the external drive itself. The crates were smart crates, which do not travel. The drive is formatted so Serato cannot write to it. Or Serato launched before the drive mounted, so quit and reopen with it connected. The same rules apply to one library across two laptops in any DJ app.

From a Vibes customer

The import worked perfectly. Have created several sets now and my life is so much easier

Danny

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Methodology

How we keep this honest.

Reviewed by Ben Modigell, founder of Vibes and a working DJ in Cologne.

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Every step is checked against the current version of Serato DJ.

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We make Vibes. We show the native way first and honestly, then where Vibes genuinely helps, and we say when it does not.

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Last reviewed June 2026.

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