Burning CDs for CDJs

Discs that load, cue and read in the booth

A lot of clubs still run CDJs that can't play from USB, and a disc that won't read halfway through a set is a bad night. These are the choices that make a CD reliable on CDJs. None of them are complicated.

Use CD-R, not CD-RW

Every CDJ plays audio CD-R. CD-RW reflects much less light, and some older or worn decks read it badly or not at all. Use CD-RW for testing at home and CD-R for the gig.

Buy decent media and burn at a moderate speed

Cheap blank discs are where most read errors start. A recognised brand costs little more. Burning at the drive's top speed can also leave marks the laser has more trouble reading, especially on older decks, so pick a moderate speed from Pregap's speed menu for discs that matter. It adds a couple of minutes.

Put track markers where you'll cue

A CDJ can only jump straight to the start of a track. If a mix is one 70-minute file, you can't skip to the next tune.

Split the mix into one file per tune before burning, or add the tracks individually.
Leave every gap at zero, which is Pregap's default. The disc then plays straight through as one continuous mix, with a marker at every tune.
Each track must be at least four seconds long, a limit set by the CD standard. Pregap's preflight flags any that are shorter.

Fill in CD-Text

CDJs that read CD-Text show the artist and title on the deck's display, which beats "Track 07" when you're choosing the next tune in a dark booth. In Pregap it fills in from your files' tags, and you can edit any title in place. It is written during the burn, so it has to be right before you start.

Pregap's track list: eight tracks with titles and artist filled in from their tags, and track 4's title being renamed in place. — Titles and artists come from your tags. Click any title to rename it in place.

The CD Text panel with Album set to Late Ferry and Artist to Hollow Coast, and a meter showing 378 of 5,000 bytes used. — Disc-level CD-Text, with a meter for the space it takes on the disc.

CD-Text can only hold Western European characters. Accented letters are fine. Pregap swaps curly quotes and dashes for plain ones automatically, and flags anything else it can't store, such as Japanese or Cyrillic, before the burn.

Tested decks

Discs burned with Pregap (disc-at-once, CD-Text from the files' tags), played on real CDJs:

Deck	Track names (CD-Text)	Split mix plays gapless
Pioneer CDJ-800MK2	Yes	Yes
Pioneer CDJ-1000MK3	Yes	Yes

On both, press TEXT MODE to switch the display from the waveform to the track, album and artist names. They show up to 48 characters, scrolling when a name is long, using letters, numbers and a few symbols.

Tried a Pregap disc on another deck? Email support@pregap.app with the model, whether the names showed, and whether a split mix played through, and it'll go in this table.

Know the limits

About 80 minutes of audio on a standard blank CD-R. Pregap's disc bar shows how much of the disc the running order uses.
99 tracks is the most an audio CD can hold.
Audio CDs only. Older CDJs can't play MP3 data discs at all, and many newer ones don't show tags from them. A standard audio CD works on every CDJ ever made.

Before the gig

Play the disc through on a CDJ, or at least skip through every track.
Write on the label side with a soft CD marker. A paper sticker can make the disc spin unevenly.
Carry a second copy.