Overview of the current state of rekordbox lighting mode (January 2025)
Development seems non existent in a couple of years now. The loss of the RB-DMX1 USB to DMX interface for several months made everyone worried that was it for lighting mode, but they’ve just added support for the Enttec DMX Pro meaning lighting mode is still very much alive and now supported by the most common (and more affordable) USB to DMX interface.
Its not perfect, its got some difficulties when creating and editing lighting scenes, but so many of them would be so simple to fix if only AlphaTheta would commit a little bit more developer resource to it.
Away from the negatives, the major positive it has is that its absolutely brilliant at sync’ing lighting to the music you play. Its not just a bit good at it, it is really really good at it and you can have really sharp looking lighting from just a few fixtures using it. Phrase analysis has been part of rekordbox for a long time, but using that information and applying it to controlling lights is incredibly powerful and compelling. You can love or hate their method of applying lighting scenes to tracks and certainly their scene editor is hard to use, but if you give it a bit of time and optimise what they’ve already created for you for your own lighting setup then its a beautiful thing. Under the hood it does some things I’ve been discovering that aren’t documented too, such as fading out brightness as a section of a track ends ready to drop them back at full brightness as the new section starts, applying strobes when they really work, etc.
This integration of track data an lighting mmediately puts it ahead of many other lighting controllers out there in terms of track sync’ing – lighting mode isn’t listening to your audio and trying its best to do something nice to the beat, it literally knows everything about the track you’re playing and exactly when it changes into new sections.
The catch…..after that it is really cool feeling you then play some more and start to go ohhhh its hard to get to grips with and theres a few really annoying bits to how you program it. Honestly though, if you persevere its good. A massive part of the problem is the awful documentation. I’ve been taking a deep dive and will knock up a video on it to help others, once you see it it becoems so much easier. I’ve also created some software that can do some useful bulk actions on the lighting setup and also configure it to pass out live beat, phrase and lightign scene data via DMX for syncing with software like Beyond. I should get this out in the next few weeks…
Is it good? Is it usable?
Yeah, it is, but you need a bit of time to setup optimally for your rig. I’m not at all interested in programming lighting sequences up for individual tracks. Even if I wanted to, editing lighting scenes is slow and cumbersome to do currently, so you’ve got to really want to. (That said, if you put in the effort and create some looks they are really easy to apply to tracks).
I prefer to spend my time in rekordbox discovering and playing music, becoming a better DJ, so for me the no1 requirement is can it be setup to just work. Yes it can, the as supplied programming from rekordbox is really good, and it will give you really good perfectly synchronised lighting as long as you are willing to select a new lighting bank (look) as you bring in new tracks / every now and then (otherwise your lighting will get repetitive and boring). There are 8 banks(looks) and you can simply assign 8 buttons on your decks to do it, so its dead easy (I use my performance pads when Sampler is selected because I never use sampler, but you could assign them wherever you want, or select from a dropdown in the rekordbox performance screen if you don’t want to use buttons). You can also assign one of the 8 banks to each track in your library if you don’t want to trigger lighting live (they all default to the first if you don’t) which isn’t hard, but its a separate step you have to go into lighting mode to do. For me I prefer to change the mode live, it gives me something more to do when playing out and I’ve only got to make the decision of what lighting state to use once as each new song comes in and the vibe changes. You’ve also got 9 DMX direct control presets you can use to trigger special effects say, special functions of your fixtures maybe, and also several Interlude scenes you can program up to override and do something specific when one is selected (e.g. early evening just set a simple state that doesn’t do much – save the slick lighting for when there’s a crowd on the dancefloor).
To make it look alright using the all pre programmed lighting scenes provided by rekordbox you need a minimum of two moving heads and four RGB static lights IMHO (two moving heads and two wash lights or two bar lights may also work well as a rig – I’ve not tried). That will give you good lighting for all of the pre programmed scenes apart from the pre programmed “intro” scenes. If that’s all you’ve got (that’s all I use) you’ll need to change the intro scenes to do something as the standard programming leaves my moving heads and “Par” lights turned off, but its not too arduous a task to fix just that. If you have more lights that you can assign as “Bar” lights or mirror ball then you probably won’t need to do that as they are likely already used in those states.
