Rekordbox Unbearably Slow - Especially Deleting and Exporting

@Jack > 99% of the time, these speed issues come down to the read/write capabilities of the USB drives in use. Can you tell me which model of Kingston drives you're using so I can look up their real-world speed results?

Hello, thanks for your fast response! I've got to be honest.. the model name/number has rubbed off the USB stick, which indicates it's fairly old...!!!

Is there one you could recommend to me which would work well with Rekordbox? I'd be really grateful.

Thank you SO much!!

Personally, the only two drives I recommend are the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX (NEVER their Survivor model!), or the SanDisk Extreme Pro 3.1. Both of these drives employ SSD host chipsets to manage the memory and data transfers, providing amazing read/write performance for large and small files.

I really don't understand why there should be export slowness (e.g. >= 5 mins to export 3 playlists - total 1.2Gb) from Rekordbox of playlists when copying the files that make up those playlists within Finder in OSX takes onto the same destination USB from the same source drive less than 30 seconds. What else is Rekordbox doing? 

Your reasoning that it's the drive hardware sounds fishy to me.

You surely can't blame the drive hardware when other software that copies files works noticeably faster, can you? For the record, my source drive is an external USB3.0 magnetic drive and the destination is a Sandisk Ultra 3.0 drive.

@Chris > Because when you are exporting those playlists AS FILES, chances are you're only copying the audio data itself. Where the transfer speed takes a hit with most low-grade USB drives is rekordbox also writes several small files for each track (waveform data, hotcue and memory point data, and album artwork), and small files are the achilles heel of low-quality drives. The transfer speed dives into the dirt and then it takes forever.

Oh come on. Not 5 hours with a USB3 drive to transfer 27gb of music. My USB drive is a Corsair Flash voyager Slider X1 and it is taking ages to transfer. Surely you can shed some light on this issue. 

@Chris > That drive has abysmal 4K write speeds... like around 1MB/s reported by users, and rekordbox needs to write a whole heap of small files for the album artwork and waveform data.

If you like Corsair, the only drive from them I recommend is the GTX.

Which is better from the two you told above? And which is the maximum capacity a cdj can read?

I've yet to run into a maximum readable capacity; it would really have more to do with the capacity of the format (eg. FAT32). Realistically, the larger your library, the slower it will respond due to caching of the database.

I've had good experiences with both (but I've only tested the SanDisk 3.0 model, not the 3.1, but other users have said it's good).

Thank Mr.Pioneer.

But as those pen drives have different capacities (and of course that larger the library longer the time it takes to read), my question was more like: Do cdi have a limit reading large drives?

@Rodrigo > As noted earlier, the problem isn't rekordbox but the write speed of your drive. I can export multiple GB's of music to an SSD in a matter of minutes, but with a slow USB3 drive, it can take hours just to export a few hundred MB.

This is absolute nonsense from Pioneer, yes sure, some USBS will have slow write speed but even with fast sandisks i have experienced this abysmal slow writes from Rekordbox.

To a point i started moving my music myself using Finder to the USB stick and then creating the playlists on Rekordbox by dragging the folders from within the stick so when i "export" my playlists Rekordbox will only transfer the metadata and not the files.

If you let Rekordbox transfer your files you're pretty doomed, it's unacceptably slow.

Same with deleting tracks, if i go into my USB stick and delete a folder it deletes instantly, but if you delete using Rekordbox it takes AGES, i just did a test now deleting 3 tracks and i thinks and thinks and thinks.

Not to say the entire UI will be blocked while deleting the tracks from the USB so you can't keep editing your collection and what not.

Honestly writing an XML with some metadata, a waveform and a couple of album covers at best isn't rocket science, Pioneer should just open source or at least document how the waveform and metadata is written and let some people do some open source editor for it, i'm pretty sure there are plent of people who would do a better job at creating a better editor that would work on Mac, Windows an Linux way better than RekordBox and without all those unnecessary bells and whistles that most djs simply don't care.

@henrique > As you note, rekordbox doesn't just export the songs themselves, it also exports the analysis data, album artwork, and updates the export database. Much of that work is writing small files, and many USB drives (especially low-quality / low-performance drives) are horrible at performing that task, and thus it takes a long time. If you compare the speed of writing the same data when exported from rekordbox or from Finder / Explorer, the speeds are pretty close, so it's not rekordbox which is bottlenecking the process.

As I mentioned in another thread where you posted the same information, if you're experiencing slow exports from rekordbox when using a high-performance drive, there could certainly be something else at play, and I would ask you to please file an inquiry ticket here so our support team can gather additional information to assist you in resolving this issue. Thank you.