Organizing your library

Rekordbox decides what is in your collection. CuePoint lets you decide what to do with it: your own Collections, your own tags, your own ratings and notes, and saved filters that keep answering as your library grows.

All of it lives beside the Library page’s track table, in the left pane, so organizing and browsing are the same screen rather than two.

None of this appears in Rekordbox until you export it. CuePoint never writes to the XML you imported or to your audio files. Your Collections and ratings reach Rekordbox when you choose Export to Rekordbox…; tags, notes and favorites stay in CuePoint. See What Rekordbox does and does not see.

Collections

A Collection is your own list of tracks: a set you are building, a shortlist, anything Rekordbox has no folder for. Folders hold Collections, and Collections hold tracks.

• Make one with the buttons at the top of the Collections section, after the word New: Collection, Set and Folder. A new Collection opens ready for its name.
• Put tracks in it by dragging a selection onto it, or by choosing Add to Collection… in the selection bar’s Organize ▸ or the right-click menu.
• Arrange it by dragging rows inside it, or by selecting a row and pressing Alt+Up or Alt+Down. A Collection opens in the order you arranged, not alphabetically, and that order is saved.
• Move and file Collections by dragging them between folders.
• Act on the one you selected with the bar under the tree: Rename, Duplicate (a Smart Collection or a Set), Delete and Export… (it opens Export to Rekordbox, and its hover text says so), which every Collection, Smart Collection, Set and folder has. The bar is always there; with nothing selected it is dimmed and says “Select a Collection or Set”. The pencil, the ✕, F2 and Delete work too.
• Right-click a Collection, Smart Collection or folder — or press the menu key or Shift+F10 — for the same actions, plus the few that have no button: Freeze to a Collection… on a Smart Collection, New Set from…, and Copy set list on a Set.

A delete says what it will remove before it removes it — “this folder and the three Collections in it” — and no Collection operation ever deletes a track. Removing a track from a Collection removes it from that list and nowhere else.

The same track can be in a Collection twice, if you put it there twice on purpose. Dropping a selection that is already partly there tells you what it skipped rather than quietly making duplicates.

Sets

A Set is a running order you are preparing to play, and it lives in the same tree, filed in folders beside your Collections. It wears Prepare’s flag and shows how many entries it has. The Set button sits beside Collection, and New Set from… on a Collection, a Smart Collection or a Rekordbox playlist copies its tracks into a new Set. Add to Set… and New Set from these… are in the selection bar’s Organize ▸ and on a selection’s right-click menu, beside Add to Collection….

Selecting a Set scopes the table as a Collection does, listing each of its tracks once; the running order itself, with chapters, planned times, repeats and warnings, is edited on the Prepare page, which Open in Prepare opens. With a Set selected, the bar under the tree adds Prepare (opens it in Prepare) and Set list… (saves the set list); its right-click menu also copies the set list. Everything else here — folders, drag, rename, delete, the refresh warning, rules that name a Collection — treats a Set as it treats a Collection, and says “Set” when it means one. See Prepare.

Smart Collections

A Smart Collection is a saved filter. Build a filter in the bar above the table — genre is Techno, BPM between 122 and 126, rated 4 or more — and choose Save as Smart Collection….

It keeps asking. A track you import next month that matches the rules appears in it without you doing anything, and a track that stops matching leaves.

• Open one and its rules load into the filter bar, so you can see what it asks and change it.
• Change the rules and the bar says “modified, not saved”. You then choose: update the Collection, save the change as a second one, or keep the change as an ordinary filter and leave the saved one alone. Nothing is decided for you.
• Duplicate one to start a second, separate saved filter from it. The two never speak again.
• Freeze one to turn what it matches right now into an ordinary Collection. The frozen copy stops changing; the Smart Collection carries on.

A Smart Collection holding a rule about a tag or a Collection you later delete is shown with a warning marker rather than hidden, and it says which rule broke.

Tags

A tag is a word you put on a track — Peak-time, Opener, Needs a trim — and then filter by. A track can carry as many as you like.

• Add one from the selection bar’s Organize ▸, a track’s right-click menu, or Track details on the right. Typing a name that does not exist yet offers to make it.
• Filter by one in the filter bar: choose Tag, and pick from the tags your library actually uses, with the number of tracks beside each.
• Tend the vocabulary with the Tags… button beside the filter bar: rename, recolor, give a category, merge two into one, or delete.

Every tag shows how many tracks carry it, and both destructive actions say so before they happen: deleting Peak-time is one thing when three tracks have it and another when four hundred do.

Merging takes one tag off and puts the other on, everywhere at once, and then removes the one you merged away. It is the fix for noticing you have both “Peak Time” and “Peak-time”.

Ratings, favorites and notes

CuePoint keeps its own rating for a track, separate from the one Rekordbox imported. Track details shows both, and says which one you are looking at.

• Rate from Track details, the selection bar’s Organize ▸ or a track’s right-click menu.
• Clear a CuePoint rating and the track falls back to Rekordbox’s, rather than becoming unrated.
• Favorite is a yes-or-no of its own, and filterable.
• Notes are free text, for the thing that is not a tag.

Every change is recorded. Track details’ History shows what changed, when, and what it was before — which is how you find out what a refresh did, and what you did last Tuesday. A change you made in CuePoint has a Revert button there; see Taking a change back.

Changing a lot of tracks at once

Select some tracks and the actions apply to all of them. Select everything matching — Select all, in the row above the table — and the actions apply to every track your current search and filters match, which may be tens of thousands.

A change over more than a handful asks first, and says how many. It then runs in the background with a progress bar and a Cancel button, and you can keep working while it does. Cancelling stops it where it is; what was already changed stays changed, and the History of each track says what happened.

There is no undo button, but a whole change can be taken back: its entry in the Activity panel offers Revert this batch. The exception is adding tracks to a Collection or removing them from one, which cannot be reverted — add or remove them again instead. That is why every step says its number first.

What a refresh does to all of this

Refreshing re-reads your Rekordbox export. Tracks that are no longer in it are deleted, and their ratings, tags, notes, history and Collection membership go with them.

If any of those tracks are filed in a Collection or a Set, the preview says so before anything happens — “3 tracks you are about to remove are used in 2 Collections”, with Sets counted on their own — and you have to tick a box to continue. This is the one place CuePoint asks twice, because it is the one place a refresh destroys work that exists nowhere else.

A Collection a refresh has emptied says so, rather than inviting you to drop tracks into it as though it were new.

What Rekordbox does and does not see

Nothing you do here is visible in Rekordbox until you export it. Collections are not Rekordbox playlists and CuePoint ratings are not Rekordbox ratings, until Export to Rekordbox… writes them into a new XML file for Rekordbox to open. CuePoint never modifies the XML you imported or your music files. See Exporting to Rekordbox.

• Exported: your key, BPM, genre, label, year and rating, and the Collections, Smart Collections and Sets you choose, as playlists.
• Never exported: tags, notes and favorites, and a Set’s chapters, planned times and notes. Rekordbox’s XML has nowhere to put them. To send a tag, make a Smart Collection whose rule is that tag, and export that.

That is deliberate: a tool that reads your library and writes only to its own database is one whose mistakes are recoverable, and an export is something you ask for explicitly rather than something that happens.

Two more things follow from it:

• Rekordbox playlists shown in the left pane are a mirror, and are read-only by every path. You cannot drag into them, and nothing here changes them.
• Discover reads this same library and changes none of it: an Artist or Label page can be saved as a Smart Collection, and nothing Discover does — a run, the wantlist, a page, a push — writes to your tracks.

Where the data lives

In the same SQLite file as the rest of your library (~/.cuepoint/cuepoint.db on macOS and Linux, %USERPROFILE%\.cuepoint\ on Windows). CuePoint backs it up on launch and keeps the last several backups.

Those backups are the only copy of this work. A track can be re-imported from Rekordbox; a rating, a note, a tag, a Collection and a Set’s plan cannot be recovered from anything else. Restoring a backup brings all of it back together — the tree, the membership and its order, the tags with their colors and categories, the ratings, the notes, the history behind them, and each Set’s chapters, planned times, notes and accepted warnings.

See also

• Your library — importing, browsing and refreshing
• Prepare — Sets: running orders with chapters, planned times and checks
• Performance — measured timings for Collections, tags and large changes
• The CuePoint window — navigation, search and Track details