Get to Know Your Rekordbox Collection

In this guide, we'll be looking at one of the two ways your Rekordbox Collection can be represented.

Representations of your Collection

The native representation (for Rekordbox 6 at least) is an encrypted SQLite database stored in a master.db file and a cryptic hierarchy of binary files:

While it's possible to decrypt this database and perform operations on it directly, this is not conducive to sharing with peers. For this reason, DJ Tools operates on a manually exported XML file:

A closer look at the Rekordbox XML file

As an example, we can look at the test XML packaged in the DJ Tools repo. It's been edited to be as minimal as possible:

There are two primary sections in this XML; the first is the COLLECTION tree which houses a TRACK node for every track in your collection. The second section is a PLAYLISTS tree which contains sub-trees for all your nested folders with playlists in them. At the leaves of the tree are TRACK nodes which contain a single attribute, Key, which serves as a lookup for TRACK nodes in the COLLECTION tree via their TrackID attribute.

The TRACK nodes in the COLLECTION tree contain every piece of information about your tracks: their beatgrid, hot cues, title, artist, genre, and comments tags, etc. Let's focus on one particular attribute of the TRACK node, the Location. This attribute is a string representing the path to the audio file.

By convention, it's always prefixed with file://localhost/ and suffixed with the absolute path to the audio file. For example, if you have an audio file located at /Volumes/My_USB/Music/Favorites/best_song_ever.mp3, then the Location attribute for its TRACK node will be file://localhost/Volumes/My_USB/Music/Favorites/best_song_ever.mp3.

For Windows users, if you have a track located at D:\Music\Favorites\best_song_ever.mp3, then the Location attribute for its TRACK node will be file://localhost/D:/Music/Favorites/best_song_ever.mp3. Take note that paths in the XML are always represented as posix paths using forwardslashes rather than backslashes.

Also note that, upon inspecting your own XML export, the paths in the Location attribute will be escaped and look more like this:

file://localhost/Volumes/AWEEEEZY/DJ%20Music/aweeeezy/Bass/2023-03-21/Catacombs%20(VIP%20Bootleg)%20-%20Ternion%20Sound,%20LOST.mp3

How DJ Tools uses this XML

All of the features of the rekordbox package of DJ Tools performs reads and writes on an exported XML file. The Shuffle Tracks in Playlists feature assigns new values to the TrackNumber attribute of the TRACK nodes appearing in the provided playlists. The Copy Tracks From Playlists feature uses the Location attribute to copy audio files to a new destination. The Build Playlists From Tags feature reads the Genre and Comments attributes to collect tracks and then manipulates the PLAYLISTS tree of the XML to automatically generate your desired playlist structure.

Once you've run an operation that edits the XML, you must import those tracks and / or playlists to realize the changes. To do this, select the track(s), playlist(s), or folder(s) from rekordbox XML section of the tree view and choose "Import To Collection" or "Import Playlist"; this will overwrite any playlists, beatgrids, hot cues, tags, etc. so make sure you know what you're doing (first make a backup by exporting a fresh XML)!:

This is the same method you use to import tracks from other user's XML files (see this guide for more details).