Everything's there in rekordbox — pads lit, cues named — and the CDJ loads the same track with nothing. It's almost never the cues. It's how they got to the stick, or one player setting.
If the music got onto the stick by drag-and-drop in Finder or Explorer, the audio is there but the database isn't — and hot cues live in the database, not inside the audio files. Playlists, grids and cues all vanish together. Delete nothing; just export properly from rekordbox: right-click the playlist → Export playlist to device (or use the Devices panel / Sync Manager) and let it write the stick.
The number-one cause when the export was done right. CDJs have a HOT CUE AUTO LOAD setting (in the player's MENU/utility) — if it's off, the cues are sitting on the stick but the pads stay empty when a track loads. Set it to ON, or to the rekordbox option, which obeys the per-track flag you set in rekordbox by right-clicking a track → Hot Cue Auto Load.
rekordbox has two kinds of cue and they don't interchange. Memory cues are the marks on the waveform — on the player you step through them with the CUE/LOOP CALL arrows. Hot cues are the lettered slots/pads. If you marked everything as memory cues, nothing will ever appear on the hot cue buttons. Check which type the track really has in rekordbox before blaming the player.
The stick holds a snapshot from the moment you exported. Any hot cue you added or moved since then exists only in rekordbox. Re-export the playlist (or re-sync the device) and the stick catches up. This is the classic "half my cues are there" case.
A CDJ-2000 or 2000nexus has three hot cue slots — A to C. Cues you saved in D through H are on the stick but that player physically can't show them. Newer players (2000NXS2, 3000, most XDJs) show all eight. If you gig on mixed-age gear, keep your must-have cues in A–C.
If playlists or artwork are missing too, the stick's database is likely broken rather than the cues — that's a different fix: corrupted USB recovery if it died mid-copy, or the export troubleshooter if exports never finish cleanly.
Hot cues aren't stored inside your audio files — they live in the little database rekordbox writes next to the music when it exports a stick. Anything that breaks the chain between that database and the player — a Finder drag that never wrote one, a stale export, a player setting that doesn't auto-load — shows up as the same symptom: "my cues are gone".
Cues sorted? The manual this came from covers the CDJ-3000 end to end the same way — every control, every failure mode, in plain English with diagrams. CDJ-3000 — The Complete Visual Guide — £9, instant PDF.
Get the manual → £9 Or keep using the free stuff →