REKORDBOX
WILL NOT BEHAVE

The cause AlphaTheta name for rekordbox closing seconds after it opens is not the library, the licence or the install. On Windows, they say, "there might be a problem with its driver for display adapter", and the procedure they publish is to open Device Manager, expand display Adapter, right click the adapter in use (their own example is "Intel(R) HD Graphics") and update its driver. If that changes nothing they send you to the Intel, NVIDIA and AMD download centres to update the display driver by hand.

Why that is believable rather than strange. rekordbox draws scrolling waveforms on every deck continuously, which is a graphics job rather than an audio one. A display driver that cannot keep up with it takes the whole application down at the moment it tries to draw the first screen, which is exactly a few seconds after launch.

So the order is: update the display driver, then reinstall rekordbox only if that failed. Not the other way round.

When a track refuses to load with "Analysis Failed. There is not enough memory available.", AlphaTheta mean memory rather than disk, and their instruction is to free it: "Close applications that are not in use.", "Close the web browser.", and "Close Windows Explorer and Mac Finder." They ask you to read the actual figure in Task Manager on Windows or Activity Monitor on a Mac rather than guess at it.

Read that as memory, not storage. The message is about RAM in use, and a browser with forty tabs open is the single biggest consumer of it on most DJ laptops. That is the reason analysing a big library works on Monday and fails on Friday with nothing else changed.

Analyse before the gig, not at it. Analysis is the one job on this whole list that cannot be hurried.

You are probably right, and the deck is not lying either. AlphaTheta document the case where both are true.

The deck saying Not Analyzed does not always mean the track was never analysed, and this is the part that catches people: AlphaTheta state that "Even for tracks that have been analyzed with rekordbox, if they are loaded in the folder browsing mode, they are treated as tracks that have not been analyzed and this message appears." The instruction is to analyse in rekordbox and then load in the library browsing mode, because "The sync and quantize functions will not work without rekordbox analysis information."

This matters here more than most places, because FOLDER browsing is what this site tells you to fall back to when a library will not load at a gig. It works, and here is what it costs you in return: the deck reads plain files and treats every one of them as unanalysed, so you lose Sync and Quantize even on tracks you analysed months ago. Nothing is wrong with your drive.

Load from the library view and the grids come back.

Drag and drop that silently refuses a file is usually not a broken import. It is a file rekordbox is not permitted to open.

Some files cannot be imported at all and it is not a bug. AlphaTheta list three kinds for rekordbox on iOS: "Audio files downloaded from Apple Music", "Audio files not downloaded from iCloud", and "Audio files protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM)". They also say plainly that with Apple Music Sync Library switched on, files from that service carry DRM and rekordbox cannot take them.

The Apple Music case is the one that bites hardest, because the file looks like a normal track in a normal folder and behaves like one everywhere else on the computer. A streamed or Apple Music track is not yours to play from, whatever it looks like in the file browser. Buy the file, or use a service rekordbox supports directly.

This one has an actual figure behind it, which makes it the easiest thing on the page to plan for.

The space an exported library needs on the drive is published as a formula rather than a guess: AlphaTheta state that "A minimum of 600 kB is required to create a library. In addition, up to about 103 kB of free space is needed per track." They ask that you delete files from the drive beforehand to make room.

Do the arithmetic once and you never hit this again. A library of five thousand tracks needs somewhere around half a gigabyte of index sitting on the drive on top of the audio itself. On a drive filled to the last few megabytes with music, there is no room left for the thing that makes the music findable, and the export fails at the end rather than at the start.

Leave a gigabyte free on any drive you export to. It costs nothing and it removes the failure entirely.

A different fault from every one above, and AlphaTheta split it in two before giving any instruction.

For rekordbox that runs badly rather than not at all, AlphaTheta separate the connection from the computer. On the connection: shut the computer down, "disconnect all other USB devices and USB hubs", then connect the unit "directly to a different USB port". On the computer: "Quit all other applications.", "Disconnect from the internet and exit security software.", "Turn off wireless connections such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.", and "Turn off power-saving settings."

Three of those four computer items are things that switch themselves back on. Wifi reconnects, security software updates itself, power saving returns when the laptop goes on battery. Which is why a machine that was fine at rehearsal stutters at the venue, and why this is worth doing as a pre-gig routine rather than as a repair.

None of the above is a ten minute fix. A display driver update is not something to start with an audience waiting.

If the laptop is the problem, take the laptop out of the set. Any drive you have already exported plays in the decks with no computer involved at all, which is the whole reason this site asks you to carry one. If the drive will not read either, that is a different page.

Fix rekordbox tomorrow, on a table, with the display driver page open.