I’m a fairly new owner of two SC5000 players and an X1800 mixer (about a month). So far they’ve been fun and fantastic to work with (although I had to send one back because of a weird issue where it would not turn off unless I unplugged it). However, the replacement unit along with my other player have performed perfectly…up until a little test I performed today.
All of my music is prepared in rekordbox, so when Denon announced that rekordbox-prepared USB sticks could now be used with the SC5000 without losing cue and loop points, I was stoked. As a test, I loaded about thirty house music tracks onto a newly formatted (FAT32) USB stick using rekordbox and inserted it into one of my SC5000s. The SC5000-analyzed beatgrids were off by one or two beats for more than half of the tracks (ugh) but the weirdest surprise was that the album art which is displayed in the center of the job wheel was now really pixelated and blurry. To make sure I wasn’t imagining this, I then inserted a separate USB drive that I prepared via Engine Prime with the same tracks and the album art was crisp and clear.
Go on Pioneer forums and complain to them why rekordbox exports the album art onto usb database in only 80x80.
When SC players convert the database they use what’s in there.
Good call. I didn’t even think about rekordbox exporting a lower res album art version to the usb drive.
I hope one of the forthcoming third party transfer solutions can remedy this. I’m not quite ready to make a full jump to the engine prime desktop software.
Denon could try to implement another way of db conversion process where Engine DB cover art is created from the original cover art (that is embedded in the ID3 tag of the file instead of Rekordbox cover art) but that would significantly extend the time needed to convert the database.
Indeed a shame Rekordbox exports the album art in a low resolution, specially when you show it on the beautifull screen of the SC5000.
Slayformoney stated it correctly the album art is also embedded in the ID3tag so it is there.
Like Johnny I’m also not (yet) fully using Engine Prime, my “master” is still Rekorbox till Denon applies a number of changes in the next Engine update. Till that moment I’m using DECU as my conversion tool from Rekorbox to Engine Prime and this tool does takes the original albumart from the id3tags.
I actually just exchanged a couple of email messages with the DECU guy (Mix Master G) and am thinking about going that route for my conversion. The interface doesn’t look great but the software seems to work like a charm. I’ve kinda held off because I also got a message from the Rekord Buddy folks earlier this week stating that their rekordbox to Engine Prime version is in beta but will be released soon (after they hear back from Denon). Who knows what “soon” means in this case, though.