Cue points and BPM wrong after importing tracks from Serato

Lexicon Questions & Help
1

I’ve imported multiple times from Serato and for the most part it has worked great, but the other day I was going through my tracks and cue points were off and the BPM was wrong on the majority of tracks in my playlist. I’m guessing it was an issue with the XML import because when I looked at Lexicon all the cue points were in the correct location and the BPMs were correct. I believe I corrected it by reimporting the playlists and tracks and/or wiping out my entire collection - my question is: how the tracks get in this state? Did I change something in Serato (i.e. re-analyze tracks) and the changes didn’t make it all the way through to my Rekordbox USB? Ideally I’d like to be able to repeat this behavior so that I know what steps to perform so it doesn’t happen again. Right now all I’ve been doing is exporting to XML and then importing the XML in Rekordbox and that somehow led to the problem. I fixed the problem, but I don’t know if it was by importing the playlists and tracks, or because I wiped out my entire Rekordbox collection and reimported everything. Ideally I’d like to avoid having to reimport everything because it’s time-consuming, and I also don’t want to have to worry that cue points are going to get screwy somehow and I miss it and head out to a gig. Plus I don’t want to have to do a sanity check on all my tracks every time…

What I can’t remember is if the problem was only on the computer (in Rekordbox) or on the USB drive, too. Is cue point information stored in the MP3 or elsewhere? I believe Serato stores it in the MP3, not sure how Rekordbox does it…

Thanks!
Mike

2

What exactly was wrong with the cues and BPM?

3

The BPMs were incorrect (130 instead of 124) and the cue points would be in the wrong spot… it’s like they were shifted later so I had to either use the Pioneer cue button or manually use the jog wheel after pressing a particular cue point. I think some might have been missing altogether.

What I can’t remember is if I re-analyzed the tracks in Serato at some point in time and maybe beatgrids got updated and didn’t carry over or something like that? I can try to see if I can replicate it if this isn’t something you’ve seen before. I was also going to try changing a beatgrid manually and then see if that would cause issue…

4

I haven’t seen this before. Cues can be shifted a tiny bit (~50ms) and for that you can run the Beatshift Correction utility.
I have never seen an incorrect BPM so I suspect that (and maybe also the cues) might be due to the re-analyzing

5

Yeah, it was off by quite a bit (more than 50ms) - I’ll see if I can replicate it and then post back here.

Btw, where are cues/BPM/key stored? Are they stored as metadata in the MP3?

Thanks!
Mike

6

Serato stores them in the file yes. Lexicon and all other DJ apps store them in a database.

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