Be more like Rekordbox

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There doesn’t seem to be a day goes by without seeing some variation of the statement above.

Well ive downloaded it again tonight to reload my USB for a sesh tomorrow and I have a few things to say about Engine needing to be ‘more like Rekordbox’…

Id like to start by stating that we need to move away from this utter fallacy that Rekordbox is some kind of golden standard that all must bow down to, its clunky as hell and an absolute pain the backside to add and synchronise new music to a drive, far worse than Engine.

Lets start with adding new tracks, as ive pointed out many times before I keep all my music organised in folders that relate to playlists in DJ software, this makes it easy to switch between any platform at any time.

When I drag my folder and drop it into the playlist in Rekordbox im met with a message that I have to click every single time to say ‘skip’ when prompted to re-add all tracks, this gets boring after the 20th prompt with no option to auto choose.

Next up is having to work my way through every folder to sort by artist then right click and set ‘renumber track order’… why do I have to do this? because you cant then sort by artist on the device and see your new music in the place they are meant to be. Another weird annoying quirk that offers no real use (seeing as you can just use date added to sort by newest or oldest tracks)

Then lets get onto the analysis, ive only ever had one program cane the hell out of my M1 MacBook, and that was rendering HD video in FCP X. Well that changed tonight when I re-analysed my RB library, the MacBook was red hot and the fans were fully fired up… so thanks Pioneer for giving us such inefficient software.

Finally Synchronisation, this annoying step of waiting hours to add a couple of hundred tracks to a USB drive, followed by yet another unnecessary step of having to right click and ‘update library’ before ejecting, a step that if missed will result in you turning up to gig with NONE of your new music showing.

So lets all climb down off the Rekordbox soapbox and realise its not some golden standard to adhere to, its poor… rant over, Happy New Year everyone :+1:t3:

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Hallelujah to that. I haven’t touched regurgitated-blox for over 6 months now but I’m guessing that it won’t have suddenly got better in 6 months. It’s bloatware and dispite it’s paid legacy of starting off as a re-branded version of the paid for app “MixVibes Cross” it doesn’t do much and what it does do, it doesn’t do very well.

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It’s now cooking my USB stick syncing Pasha, 1hr in, 30% done… thats 2024 speeds right there.

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But but… pioneer is the club standard. :rofl:

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That must be why Pioneer acquired Serato, in my humble opinion, the best software for DJs I know, uncomplicated and efficient.

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I still say the ‘files’ section of Serato is hands down the best way to add music, no messing around minimising apps to drag files over etc, its all done in house on the GUI. No prompt to add duplicates it just adds new files only by default, with the only slight downside being the fact you can only analyse in offline mode and have to trigger it, but thats a small issue.

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Rekrodbox is the iTunes of DJ land. And I don’t know anyone who likes iTunes.

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I love it for cheap music, but the rest of it is woeful:) 4 quid compilations with full DJ mixable versions on is handy.

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They need a library overhaul.

All that dragging and dropping is a recipe for disaster. There is not a single right-click in serato…its all flat and drag-n-drop.

Eg i use stems on the fly and never needed to drag and drop to the stems folder to pre-analyse stems. There is no way hide that folder. I have accidentally dropped crates into it.

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Yeah that and an undo button would be handy, but my view was around the basic level UI where at least you can just add music without having to shift your app half off screen on side to accommodate a file explorer window the other.

I’ve found clicking on the crate/playlist you want to add to first then dropping the new music into the library is the safest way in all the different software.

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RB was in part what led me to becoming a Denon customer, I just found it too much of a hassle, I am not someone who is super into taggin, energy levels etc I just like to add/remove songs, edit one or to playlists and export, Engine has comer a long way since I at least joined the community, whilst it may not be to everyones tastes it’s simplicity for all I need to do is great, yes there can be the odd glitch but 8/10 it works as intended.

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Love the 4 mini crates you can have open at once though, and the app where you can do you loops/queues on the move - the denon version of it is your folder / playlist tree bouncing around randomly losing your positions, what you had last selected in a playlist etc etc. Equally as clunky.

I still miss Traktor for playlist organisation to be honest, it just worked.

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Traktot is the goat

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happy new year!

I feel exactly the same. Rekordbox is a slow and overloaded piece of software. It needs a lot of time to get into it even if you only need it to prepare USB sticks for gigs. But it is so slow! There are a few more things to implement in engine like more tag editing functions etc. but engine is very quick and easy to use. It is the only DJ software which starts up quickly even with a large library. Serato is slower, Traktor is slower, Rekordbox takes the longest time of all. But when Denon changed the new downbeat detection the grid gets detected more accurate than in Serato. The analasys of songs is one of the fastest I’ve ever seen.

Please keep Engine this way! Fast and easy to use with some improved (tag editing) features.

@micropizza yes this is one thing they should improve (bouncing playlist trees). Do you use a mac? I experience it on my macbook.

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I’ve experienced it on both Mac and Windows

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Ok. hope this will be fixed soon.