On your CDJ or XDJ, a three-band waveform Solco wrote shows how loud the track really is. A quieter track looks smaller than a loud one, and that's on purpose: the player doesn't know the track is quiet, so the waveform is your cue to raise the trim before you bring it in.
rekordbox does it differently. It stretches every track's scrolling waveform to fill the screen, however quiet the track is. So on a drive with both apps' tracks, rekordbox's three-band waveforms look bigger, and a quiet Solco track can look small beside them. Nothing is wrong with the track or the export.
How big is small
Heights follow a decibel scale, as your ears do:
- A loud master fills the screen.
- A track 10 dB quieter reaches about two-thirds of the height.
- A track 20 dB quieter reaches about half.
So a quiet track is smaller but still easy to read, and of two tracks the louder always looks bigger. Only near-silence draws flat.
What to do
- Raise the trim on the mixer for a track whose waveform looks small, then match it by ear and on the channel meters.
- Check loudness in Solco before the gig: the Levels columns show each track's loudness, so you can spot the quiet ones. Solco measures it, but doesn't change the exported audio or set the player's gain.
The look
The three-band view on the player has the shapes rekordbox's has, each band with its own height and a kick that falls away slowly, in the player's colours: bass in blue, brown where bass and mids overlap, amber where the mids rise above the bass, and highs in white. The difference is size: Solco keeps each track's real level, so a quiet track stays smaller. A track analysed before this look keeps its earlier waveform on the player until Solco has reached it, and the drive's next update brings the new one.
The blue and RGB views, which older players show, follow rekordbox's. Their scrolling waveform fills the screen on every track, like rekordbox's, so there it isn't a cue to raise the trim. Their overview stays smaller on a quiet track. To see them in Solco, choose RGB or Blue under Settings › Appearance › Deck waveform. The deck then previews what those players show, in Solco's own colours, and doesn't follow the gain.
In Solco itself, the waveform follows the gain the track plays at, so it grows when you turn the gain up.
See "Exporting to a CDJ or XDJ USB drive" for the rest of what goes on the drive.