Where To Get Intro Edits As A DJ — Pools, Edit Sites, Or Make Your Own
Where DJs actually get intro edits from — record pools, edit sites and producers, and making your own — what each is good for, and why the records you want most usually need the last one.
You need an intro on a record so you can mix into it. The original has the vocal on bar one, or a fade-in, or a skit. So where do DJs actually get intro edits from?
There are three answers, and most working DJs use all of them.
1. Record pools
A record pool is a subscription service for DJs: you pay monthly and download DJ-ready versions of current music. DJcity, BPM Supreme, ZipDJ, Club Killers, Digital DJ Pool and plenty of genre-specific pools all work this way.
What you get is usually a handful of versions per track — intro, clean, dirty, short edit, sometimes an acapella or instrumental — already cut on the grid and tagged.
Good for: this month’s releases, the big records, anything being pushed to DJs right now.
Not so good for: anything that isn’t. Pools edit music while it is being promoted, so the back catalogue, deep cuts, scene records and older tunes often have no intro version at all. We wrote about why in why record pools never made an intro version of your favourite old record.
2. Edit sites, other DJs and producers
Beyond the pools there is a big world of DJ edits made by other DJs and producers — sold on Bandcamp, shared in edit groups, or on dedicated edit sites.
Good for: remixes, blends and reworks you won’t find anywhere else, and edits of records the pools skipped.
Watch out for: consistency and legitimacy. Quality varies a lot, you’re relying on someone else’s choices about length and where the drop lands, and “free intro edit download” sites are often re-uploads with no right to share them — or worse, bad encodes and malware. If a site wants you to disable security warnings to get the file, walk away.
3. Make your own
The third answer used to be the hard one: open a DAW, separate the stems, find the downbeat, loop a section, line the drop up by hand, fade the joins, bounce. An hour a track while you’re learning — fine for one record, hopeless for a crate.
That changed when stem separation got good. You no longer need the original session files; a clean instrumental comes out of the finished master you already own. Which means the intro version that doesn’t exist is now something you can simply make.
That is what IntroEdits does. Pick a track from your Serato, Rekordbox or VirtualDJ crate, put the drop on the white line, and choose 8, 16 or 32 bars. It finds the grid, separates the instrumental, builds the run-up from the track’s own audio, carries the vocal lead-in over the tail, and lands the drop on the one. You can add an outro at the other end the same way — or make an outro on its own — so the record hands over to clean beat instead of fading out.
About a minute a track, saved next to the original with your DJ name on it.
Good for: everything the pools skipped — older records, deep cuts, your own promos, the track you’ve been skipping for years because there’s nowhere to mix in.
Which should you use?
| You want an intro for… | Best place to look |
|---|---|
| A new release being pushed to DJs | Your record pool |
| A remix or rework | Edit sites and producers |
| An older record, deep cut or regional track | Make your own |
| A record you own but can’t mix into | Make your own |
| An outro, or an outro-only version | Your pool if it has one, otherwise make your own |
Most DJs end up with a pool for new music and their own edits for the rest. The pool keeps you current; your own edits are what make your set sound like yours.
Where to start
Go through a crate you know well and pick the records you skip because they’re awkward to mix. Those are the ones no pool will ever fix.
Try one in your browser at introedits.com/lab/try — no install — or download the Mac app to work straight from your crates. New to this? Start with what an intro edit is, then how to make one and how many bars it should be.