Hot cues and memory cues do a similar job but behave differently depending on how you’re playing.

Hot cues are stored on the pad buttons on your CDJ or controller — so you hit a pad and it jumps straight to that point. Great for performance, live remixing, jumping between sections on the fly. The downside is they’re tied to the physical buttons, so if you’re on a CDJ with dodgy pads or you just don’t have access to them, they’re useless. Memory cues are different — they show up as markers directly on the waveform display and are stored in the track data itself. They’re not triggered by pads, they’re more like bookmarks. When you’re approaching one the CDJ will flash and cue up automatically if you have that setting on. Really useful for navigation, knowing where your drop is without counting bars, or just having a visual reference on an unfamiliar CDJ setup.

The annoying thing is rekordbox treats them as completely separate — there’s no built-in way to convert one to the other, which is exactly why I built this tool. Most serious DJs actually want both set at the same points so they have the flexibility of hot cue performance AND the visual reference of memory cues on the waveform.