AlphaTheta has today opened Rekordbox 7 to public beta. Rekordbox 7, while instantly familiar in look and feel to anyone who has used the previous version, nonetheless has a lot of changes, big and small.

Having spent just a few minutes playing with it this afternoon, here are the biggest things that we spotted. This list is almost certainly not complete, so please tell us what you find and we’ll add to it as we go! (By the way, notable on the loading page is that the software is referred to as AlphaTheta Rekordbox 7 and not Pioneer DJ Rekordbox 7. Make of that what you will…):

What’s New In Rekordbox 7

• Auto Cue Point Analysis – Taking a leaf out of Mixed In Key’s book, this adds hot cues/memory cues to your tracks automatically. The analysis takes a while, but when it’s finished you have hopefully usable cues without having to add them manually. There is a control panel where you can specify the number and type of cues and other information to get them close to something you can use
• Related Tracks Playlists – This appears to essentially be the software version of the track filter feature on standalone DJ gear, where you can specify criteria to filter your tunes by in order to choose something suitable to play next. The usuals are there like BPM and Key, but there are lots of other useful options as well. And you can save your favourite searches to appear in the library tree area too
• Collection Radar – This is a similar thing but with an online cloud database. Effectively it suggests tracks to play next based upon what other DJs play, and/or other AI criteria as yet undocumented. There’s a similar thing already in VirtualDJ software. And here you can tell it to suggest tunes from your streaming service too. Again there is a panel that lets you set up the criteria it uses here. This is something completely new and looks like it could be a lot of fun, especially for casual DJ sets
• Dual player improvements – While Export mode has always had two decks if required, now they can be linked for simultaneous playback with a new button, making planning transitions easier
• A completely overhauled preferences panel – I never liked the Rekordbox preferences panel, feeling it was overly cluttered. And now it’s been redesigned with a new navigation, larger fonts and a generally much neater look

Other points

So just a few words on other things we noticed:

• The fonts are tidier and overall it looks cleaner
• It appeared snappier to me
• There’s a choice of tree or column view in the left hand panel in the library

What’s missing?

The one big thing I feel many would have wanted from Rekordbox 7 would be improved stems. But as far as I can tell they’re exactly the same as they were before, both the iffy audio quality and the general clunkiness of them. (For instance when you turn a stem on or off the waveform has to redraw itself.)

I would imagine this is something that’s being worked on with some haste and would imagine it would appear in Rekordbox 7.1, but for now it seems like the new version has the same stems functionality as the previous one.

Where to get it

This has been made available to all Rekordbox subscribers, as far as we know, so keep an eye on the splash page inside your Rekordbox 6 software for details or just grab it from this link.  The public beta is open from now until the 19 February.

• Do let us know your thoughts below.