Hi. I’m new to Lexicon and loving it.
My use case is as follows- My main collection is in Traktor and that is where I normally work. I am shifting to Rekordbox slowly with the idea to run on both DJ software for a while before deciding to fully jump.
So far, I have sync’d my whole library to Lexicon. Maintaining this is easy from Traktor to Lexicon and vice a versa. The next thing I have done is sync it fully to Rekordbox 6. This was okay for the most part except a late realisation that I should have converted the keys before syncing across to Rekordbox. The Rekordbox analysis takes years (!), so I still have around 30% of my library in Rekordbox left to analyse for waveforms.
My question is this - If I sync updates in Lexicon to Rekordbox 6, will it merge the changes or overwrite the analysis? For example, if I went for a sync without converting keys, will Lexicon overwrite existing analysis in Rekordbox for the key etc and will Rekordbox lose the waveforms of already analysed tracks?
I’m unsure because I don’t see a merge option for Rekordbox 6.
Thanks.
It should overwrite any changes that Lexicon has. So if Lexicon has a different key then it should send that to RB.
It should not delete any waveform data. If the track is analyzed and has a waveform in RB and then you sync from Lexicon->RB again, both of that should stay. But… I do hear some users mentioning that they are sometimes losing waveforms after a sync. I’ve not been able to confirm that. So I would sync (small) playlists just to be sure about this.
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Hi Christiaan. Thanks.
Yes, I have sync’d before and it did lose data for some tracks. Hence the question actually. I faced this early in my Rekordbox analysis journey, so it wasn’t a big problem. Now that I am 70% there, I want to be sure.
I have tried a few playlists, by choosing the playlist option. That seems to work ok and does not lose any rekordbox specific analysis. I have not tried the Full sync again. This is using the ‘convert to Musical Keys’ option.
The first big sync across from lexicon > RB, I converted to musical keys because the ‘original keys’ option wasn’t working for the RB sync. However, the keys in Lexicon (coming in from Traktor) are musical keys anyway.
I’ll test using a couple of options with the keys again with one or two playlists and see what happens.
The key conversion for the entire sync takes a very long time, so would be good to avoid it. In general it should be okay because the collection updates will be small now. I’ll feeback.
I lost all waveform and beatgrid data for my entire library. Hot/memory cues are still in place, but I’ve had to reanalyze ~5k tracks. It’s been a bit of a nightmare.
@grantbey What Lexicon version are you using?
Do your tracks have a beatgrid in Lexicon? If they have the 3 vertical dashes in the track browser then they do.
I have heard that sometimes there are a few waveforms missing but never all of them. I still don’t know why that happens though.
Lexicon v 1.1.18.
It turned into a real disaster when cloud sync started doing its work. It treated all my tracks as new and then I landed up with duplicates of almost every track in my library, although both pointing at the same file. It also duplicated all my tags and tag categories, assigning one version of the tag to each track.
Luckily I managed to use the Rekordbox backup Lexicon created to get somewhat back to normal, however each time I do that I get another duplicate of each track. Currently there are four!
I have cloud sync is disabled now and I need to figure out how to completely clear it online and use this db as the source of truth.
The only thing I’ve truly lost in the process are the original beat grids. This is a little annoying because I know I’ve manually edited a bunch over the years if they were a little off, so I’ll have to watch out for that.
Hm I’m not quite sure how the RB cloud sync works internally so I don’t know why it is duplicating tracks. Especially 4 times seems odd. I can’t really help with that part.
I do know that the cloud sync is a whole different process than Rekordbox and maybe that’s what removed all the beatgrids, but that’s just a guess.
The beatgrids weren’t backed up automatically by Lexicon because that’s the only thing that’s not in the database and the beatgrid files are huge so backing them up would take quite long and take a lot of space too. That’s why I decided not to backup those automatically. 
Hi Christiaan. I haven’t been able to test this yet because I was gigging over the weekend, so busy with prep and work. Hence the silence. I’m waiting for tracks to finish analysing on Rekordbox this evening, then I’ll try with a small sample and feedback.
Sorry to hear about your troubles grantbey.
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Hello @Christiaan,
I did my sync across to rekordbox today.
Observations:
- Only two tracks lost waveforms within a set of 20 playlists (perhaps a good 1000+ songs). Worth noting that this was after the entire collection in Rekordbox was fully analysed for waveforms at least.
- There was a chunk of 20 of them missing waveforms in that set too, but the filenames had changed for those tracks. So what has probably happened is that Rekordbox has just picked them up as new tracks. For context, the filenames changed because I was doing a clean up of special characters on my collection using Mp3Tag over the weekend.
- Syncing with original keys, sends Open Key to Rekordbox. This will rewrite Musical Keys I have analysed in Rekordbox. I have musical keys enabled both in Traktor and Lexicon, yet the Original Key settings sends over Open Key. I wonder if this is because the Traktor NML may have them tagged as Open Key format. Not sure. It would be nice to have an option to Sync without sending the key from Lexicon in this particular case.
All in all, not any huge problems. I noticed something else for which I’ll open a new thread.
Thanks.
You can see the original key for your tracks in Lexicon. If that is already Open Key then it makes sense that original key will send Open Key to RB.
Glad to hear the rest is (almost) good!
That’s the thing. I’m unsure if the original is Open Key. I have Musical Key turned on in Traktor and have been using that for a while. The Traktor NML is the true source. So, Traktor > Lexicon > Rekordbox. May be the Traktor option to display Musical Key’s just converts them for display.
Either way, using the convert option and selecting Musical Key works as a work around, if it is a problem. I can only test with a new batch of songs, making sure I get Traktor to write the musical keys to the file tags and then do the sync Traktor > Lexicon > Rekordbox.
Traktor saves the key as numerical values that represent an Open Key (or Camelot, the same thing) so when LXC imports from Traktor, it reads those numbers and imports it as Open Key.
So an original key sync is then an Open Key sync.
But you prefer having musical keys in RB? I figured everyone prefers Open Key (or Camelot) since that is the standard in DJing.
That makes sense then. So LXC is showing expected behaviour.
Yes, I veered away from open key sometime ago when I started producing music, beats and loops. It just helps me love remix more easily when I have the musical keys in front of me, and playing with musical keys before me, I can remember more easily post gig which tracks I’d like to remix or edit in certain ways for my next gig.