The analysis bar's been parked for an hour, or half the library shows no waveform at all. Analysis fails for a small set of reasons, and they're all findable. Work down the list.
Analysis runs track by track, so a single corrupt or half-downloaded file stalls everything behind it. Watch which track the bar dies on, pull that one out, and re-download or re-encode it — the queue moves again immediately. (Same culprit that freezes USB exports: that fix is here.)
If the track's row is greyed out, rekordbox has lost the audio file itself — it's been moved, renamed or deleted — and there's nothing to analyse. Relink the files first, then analyse. Full relink walkthrough here.
Old iTunes purchases from the DRM era ("protected AAC", usually .m4p) are locked files — rekordbox can't decode them, so it can't analyse or play them, and no DJ software can. Replace them with unprotected copies of the same tracks; there is no setting that fixes this.
Waveform, beatgrid, key and phrase detection means fully decoding every file. A few thousand fresh FLACs or WAVs is genuinely hours of number-crunching, and it looks a lot like a hang. Leave it running overnight rather than force-quitting halfway — and don't expect it to fly while you're also playing a set in Performance mode.
If the bar truly hasn't moved past a healthy track in ages, quit rekordbox completely, relaunch, select the un-analysed tracks, right-click → Analyze Track. The queue rebuilds and usually sails past wherever it was stuck.
If tracks analyse fine but the grid lands in the wrong place — classic with older disco, funk or anything played by a live drummer — that's the analysis mode. In Preferences → Analysis, switch between Normal (steady electronic tempos) and Dynamic (tempo that drifts), then re-analyse the affected tracks.
Analysis has to fully decode the audio to draw the waveform and find the grid and key, then write all of that into rekordbox's database. So anything unreadable — a corrupt download, a missing file, a DRM lock — stalls it, and anything CPU-hungry slows it. The symptom is always the same parked progress bar; the cause is almost always one specific file.
Library analysing cleanly? The manual this feeds into covers the CDJ-3000 end to end — 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 →