A cue point, sometimes also called a hot cue, is a saved position inside a track that you can jump to instantly, including while the track is already playing. They are triggered from performance pads and saved with the track in your library, so they travel with it.
Cue point and hot cue are the same thing under two names. Serato calls them Cue Points, rekordbox and Traktor call them Hot Cues, and DJs use both words interchangeably in conversation. If somebody tells you to “set a cue point”, they almost certainly mean this.
Two things that are genuinely different
- The CUE button on the deck holds a single temporary point that decides where the track starts. One per deck, not saved to a pad.
- Memory cues, a Rekordbox-only feature, are saved markers that move the playhead to a position and then wait for you to press PLAY. They are for navigation rather than performance: a marker 32 bars before the outro, a warning about a key change. A hot cue does not wait, it plays.
What we use CUE points for
The useful ones mark structure rather than random spots you liked. The start of the first real phrase, the point where the drums come in, the beginning of a section you can mix out of, the place a long intro finally becomes danceable. Set them once while preparing a track and you never have to find them again mid set, which is the whole point. A cue point is a decision you make calmly now so you do not have to make it in a hurry later.
Keep the system consistent across your whole library. If pad 1 always means “the drop” and pad 2 always means “where the intro becomes usable”, you can load something unfamiliar under pressure and still know what each pad will do without reading the waveform. In some DJ software, Traktor among them, you can also store loops in these slots, which helps a lot in live mixing.
Most software and hardware have 8 pads, the smaller controllers get only 4, which may not be enough for whole song.