About
Built by a DJ. Not a company.
CueRadar is a one-person project. 20 years behind the decks, too many late nights tidying my own library by hand, and one growing irritation with the tools we're stuck with. Eventually I automated it. That tool is CueRadar.
Who I am
Hi, I'm Thomas Gravesen.
I've been DJing for 20 years — long enough to have outgrown three software suites, two laptops, and one set of CDJs that no longer accepts modern file formats. The day job is software, infrastructure, and security: I'm the founder & CEO of Aboutweb.dk (since 2006) and Hosting.gl (since 2019), where I've spent the last two decades building hosting and email systems for clients who can't afford downtime — public-sector authorities, emergency services, and businesses with hard compliance requirements.
That background shapes how CueRadar is built. I've spent two decades designing systems where data privacy and resilience actually matter — and the same approach informs CueRadar. The whole audit runs locally on your Mac. Your library stays in your folders, no audio is uploaded, nothing about your tracks is fingerprinted in someone else's cloud.
CueRadar itself started as a private script. A sanity-check before a gig — does any file in tonight's set have a problem the venue's CDJ-3000s will choke on? It grew until it stopped looking like a script. So I built a real app around it.
Why I built it
Every DJ has the same drawer.
You can see it, you know it's broken, but fixing 30,000 tracks by hand is not how anyone wants to spend a Sunday.
Same track at three bitrates. None of them tagged consistently.
"Lossless" file that's actually a 192 kbps MP3 with a new extension.
Random low-bitrate files mixed in with the lossless stuff.
"Untitled — Bootleg Mix" with the wrong artist embedded for a decade.
Tag-trusting tools
Believe whatever the ID3 tag says. A "FLAC" file is a FLAC, full stop — even when it's been transcoded three times and the spectrum is dead at 16 kHz.
Archivist tools
Built for collectors. No Camelot harmonic mapping, no CDJ format compatibility, no profile-based pre-flight before a gig. Wrong audience.
CueRadar reads the audio, not the tags. It fingerprints with Chromaprint, scores quality from the spectrogram, and checks every file against the gear you actually play on.
The same workflow I run before every set — just packaged so other DJs can run it too.
Where this is going
The Swiss-army knife for DJs.
Library audit is just chapter one. CueRadar wants to be the everyday DJ tool — the thing you open before Rekordbox. And eventually, the thing you open instead of Rekordbox.
Library audit
Honest quality scores from the audio, Chromaprint fingerprinting, Camelot harmonic mapping, CDJ / XDJ / controller pre-flight before a gig. All local, all offline.
Track prep & harmonic tools
Cue points, hot cues, beat-grid editing, harmonic mixing helpers. The day-to-day prep work, without leaving CueRadar.
Set planning & smart crates
Build sets, save them, smart crates that respect what plays well together. Energy curves, key compatibility, gig-ready exports.
USB / device export
Write straight to a USB for CDJs / XDJs without going through Rekordbox first. Your set, your stick, your gig.
Full Rekordbox replacement
One macOS app. No subscription. No cloud library. Your data, your machine, your workflow — staying exactly where you put them.
Rekordbox isn't getting better. It's accumulating buttons. New paid tiers, lock-in around its database format, a UI that hasn't been re-thought since the CDJ-2000 came out. Meanwhile the things DJs actually want — fast library hygiene, honest analysis, a workflow that respects the years of work in your folder structure — don't move.
Long road. But it's the road.
Honest box
Who CueRadar is — and isn't — for.
Built for
- Working and touring DJs who play the actual master, not whatever the download was.
- Anyone whose library has crept past 10k tracks and stopped being audit-able by ear.
- DJs who pre-flight against a specific CDJ / XDJ / controller before a gig.
- People sick of Rekordbox telling them what their library is.
Not really for
- Audiophile archivists who don't DJ — there are better tag-management tools for that.
- People who fully trust whatever their analysis software decided about their tracks.
- Anyone looking for a streaming-only workflow — CueRadar audits local files.
- Windows or Linux users — it's macOS 14+ only and likely staying that way.
How I build it
A few non-negotiables.
Audio, not tags.
Every verdict comes from the audio stream itself. Tags lie, audio doesn't. If a file is labelled FLAC but its spectrum cuts off at 16 kHz, CueRadar says so.
No cloud, no library upload.
The audit runs entirely on your Mac. Your library stays in your folders — no audio uploaded, nothing about your tracks fingerprinted in someone else's cloud.
Free. Permanently.
No tiers, no "Pro", no time-limited trial. If the project ever needs to make money I'll tell you exactly how, exactly when, and you'll keep what's already on your machine.
Honest about what it can't do.
I'd rather under-promise here than over-promise and have you find out at 2 AM in a club. The Features page lists what's real, the Changelog lists what shipped. That's it.
Say hi
The inbox is actually mine.
Bug reports, feature ideas, "why did you do it this way" — all welcome. No support tier, no chatbot. Replies come from me, usually within 24 hours.