Rekordbox Hot Cues: Set, Color, Name, Export and Auto-Fill Them

Rekordbox gives you 8 hot cues per track, labeled A through H, and each one instantly jumps playback to a saved point in the song. You set a hot cue by clicking an empty hot cue slot at the exact moment you want to mark, and every cue exports with the track to USB for CDJs. This guide covers all of it: setting, deleting, coloring, naming, exporting, and filling rekordbox hot cues automatically.

Hot Cues in Rekordbox: The Basics

Every track in your collection gets 8 hot cue slots, A to H. Press a hot cue and the track jumps to that point and plays immediately, whether the deck was playing or paused. That instant-play behavior is what makes them a performance tool, not just a bookmark.

With Quantize on, every hot cue you set snaps to the nearest beat on the beatgrid. Leave it on for almost everything, it's the difference between tight cue juggling and sloppy triggers. Turn it off only when you need a cue between beats, like the exact start of a vocal phrase or an FX hit.

Hot cues are different from the main CUE button. The CUE point is a single temporary start position: press it while paused to set it, hold it to preview, release to snap back. Hot cues are permanent, there are 8 of them, and they play instantly instead of returning.

One more distinction worth knowing: a hot cue jumps and plays, while a memory cue is a navigation marker you scroll to with the search buttons. Full breakdown of memory cues in Rekordbox is covered there.

How to Set Hot Cues in Rekordbox (Step by Step)

There are two ways to set rekordbox hot cues, and most DJs end up using both.

Method 1: While paused (precise placement)

• Load the track onto a deck.
• Pause playback and drag the waveform to the exact spot you want. Zoom in on the enlarged waveform for accuracy.
• Make sure Quantize is on so the cue snaps to the grid.
• Click any empty hot cue slot (A-H). The cue is set and saved instantly.

This is the prep method. Do it at home, with headphones, before the track ever sees a gig.

Method 2: On the fly during playback

• Play the track.
• When the moment you want arrives, click an empty hot cue slot.
• With Quantize on, the cue lands on the nearest beat even if your timing was slightly off.

This is how you grab a cue mid-set when you notice a moment worth keeping.

If you have a controller connected, the performance pads do the same job. Set the pads to Hot Cue mode and tap an empty pad at the right moment. Same rules apply: empty pad sets a cue, occupied pad triggers it.

Cues save automatically to your collection the moment you set them. There is no save button to press.

How to Delete and Move Hot Cues

To delete a hot cue in Rekordbox, right-click the hot cue slot and choose the delete option. On a controller, hold the delete/clear modifier (usually Shift) and tap the pad you want to remove.

There's no drag-to-move. If a cue is in the wrong spot, the workflow is delete, reposition, re-set:

• Delete the misplaced cue.
• Pause and drag the waveform to the correct position.
• Set the cue again in the same slot.

One safety note for hardware users: on most controllers, Shift + pad deletes the cue instantly with no confirmation. Mid-set, with sweaty hands, it happens. If you wipe a cue during a gig, just re-set it on the fly and fix the placement properly later at home.

Hot Cue Colors: Change Them and Build a System

To change a hot cue's color, right-click the hot cue slot and pick from the 16-color palette. You can also reset it back to the default from the same menu.

Rekordbox also has preset color modes that control what color new cues get automatically. In Preferences > View, the Hot Cue Color setting offers four modes: CDJ (everything green, the classic Pioneer look), Cold 1 and Cold 2 (blue and teal tones), and Colorful (a different color per slot). Pick one as your base, then override individual cues by right-clicking.

Why bother? Because at 2am on a dark stage, you're not reading labels, you're reading colors. A consistent scheme means every track in your library speaks the same language. Example scheme:

• Green = intro / mix-in point
• Red = the drop
• Blue = outro / mix-out point

Once every track follows the same pattern, you can load anything in your library and mix it without pre-listening. Slot B is always the drop. That consistency is worth more than any individual cue, and it's the same principle behind a consistent cue point system across your whole library, not just the colors.

One hardware caveat: cue colors only light up on RGB pads. Controllers and players with single-color pads still store your colors, but they only show on the laptop screen or the player display, not on the pads themselves.

Naming Your Hot Cues

Click the space next to a hot cue's time value and a text box opens. Type a short name and it saves with the cue.

Naming is worth the effort for cues that aren't obvious from position alone: "vocal in," "acapella only," "FX riser," "double drop." When you're deciding mid-set whether a cue is safe to jump to, a two-word label answers the question instantly.

For structural cues, intro, drop, outro, skip the names. If your color system already says red equals drop, a label adds nothing. Colors are read in a glance; names take a beat longer. Use names for the exceptions, colors for the rules.

Exporting Hot Cues to USB for CDJs

Hot cues live with the track in your Rekordbox collection, so exporting them is automatic, they ride along whenever you export tracks to a USB device.

The standard flow:

• Plug in a USB drive formatted as FAT32 or exFAT.
• Build a playlist with the tracks you're playing.
• Drag the playlist onto the USB device in the sidebar (or use Sync Manager).
• Wait for the export to finish, then eject properly.

Every hot cue, color, and name travels with the tracks. Plug the USB into a CDJ or XDJ and your cues are there.

One setting trips people up: by default, some players make you press the call button to load a track's hot cues onto the pads. To skip that, enable auto load. In Rekordbox, Preferences > DJ System has a Hot Cue section with a "Prepare Hot Cue Auto Load Setting for CDJ use" option, turn it on so new tracks are flagged for auto load. You can also flag tracks individually from the track info panel. With it enabled, cues land on the player's pads the moment the track loads.

Your cues also survive a computer change. Use Rekordbox's library backup, restore it on the new machine, and every cue comes with it.

Rekordbox XML Export: Your Hot Cues Outside Rekordbox

Rekordbox can write your entire collection to a single XML file: go to File > Export Collection in xml format and choose where to save it.

That file contains your track list, playlists, beatgrids, and, the part that matters here, every hot cue and memory cue, with positions, colors, and names.

Why care? The XML is the doorway in and out of Rekordbox. It's how you migrate to other DJ software, how library tools read your collection, and how third-party tools write cues back into Rekordbox. Any app that can generate a Rekordbox-format XML can hand you a library full of cues, ready to import through the XML panel in your preferences.

That import direction is exactly how automatic cue tools deliver their results, which brings us to the obvious question.

Can Rekordbox Set Hot Cues Automatically?

Yes, partially. Rekordbox 7 includes CUE Analysis, which can set hot cues and memory cues automatically using phrase analysis, Rekordbox's detection of a track's sections (intro, verse, chorus, outro).

To improve where it places them, you train it: add tracks you've already cued by hand to the CUE Analysis Playlist (Pioneer recommends 30 or more), then run the analysis to generate your personal cue tendency profile. New tracks get analyzed against that profile.

Honest assessment: it's a real feature with real limits. It needs a decent pile of consistently-cued training tracks before results improve. Placement quality varies a lot by genre, it leans on phrase detection, so tracks with unusual structure confuse it. The learning side sits behind a paid subscription tier. And users on Pioneer's own forums report generic results and overwritten manual cues, so check the "Prohibit overwriting CUEs" setting before running it on tracks you've already prepped.

If you want automation built around the moment that actually matters, that's what KimiCue does differently. Instead of phrase analysis, it detects the drop in each track and places 8 structured hot cues around it, before the drop, at the drop, and after, across your whole library in one run. Results come back into Rekordbox through the XML workflow you just read about. It's $29 one-time, no subscription, and the free demo processes 2 tracks a day with no card required, so you can check its drop detection against your own music before paying anything.

For a fair comparison of every option in this space, including where CUE Analysis genuinely wins, read every way to auto-set cues in 2026.

FAQ

Wrapping Up

The workflow is simple once you've done it on a few tracks: set your rekordbox hot cues with Quantize on, color them to a consistent scheme, name the non-obvious ones, and export to USB with auto load enabled. Do that across your library and every track becomes mixable at a glance.

And if cueing your whole library by hand sounds like a month of evenings, the auto-fill route exists: KimiCue can place structured, drop-based cues across all of it in one run.