thank you again. I know that my “feature request” is born due to the nature of my kind of working. Sure, I don’t need the whole bunch of my music library in Engine Prime. But as you suggest, to copy the 100-200 files I need for a specific event to a folder on my local drive, I have to listen to them. So I need a tool like WinAmp for rehearsal, than copy, then import into Engine Prime, than check the Tags, than analyze and finally copy to USB or SD-Card.
It would be great to save time and work and have one “swiss knife”-tool a.k.a. Engine Prime to accomplish all this.
The reason why I’m so stubborn is, that - in my oppinion - it is an arbitrary decision of the developer of Engine Prime not to recognize files from networked drives and I cannot see any serious reason. So my hope is, that someone of Denon says, that this will be fixed/changed/added in a near future update.
The reason is not known to me as well, but I have a guess, what can be a obstacle here. Engine Prime creates a Data base on every local drive with music. NAS is not a local drive, and EP can’t make its database there, so can’t import the tracks. The logic behind the EP data base is, that it needs to be in the place with its music. Conclusion would be that EP, has limited network possibilities (so far only dropbox option, but still this needs a dropbox app installed on Your computer, so I think EP alone has still no network capability).
There is already a feature request to support NAS that was raised by one of our friends here on the forum. I will make a search and add a link to it here as well.
I would like to hear a statement from an official supporter of Denon. I mean solo networked drives, no cloudspace like Dropbox or so. A program does not have to have any capabilities to access a network share. The operating system does it all. If a program utililizes the standard systemcalls of the operating system to open and access files, there is no difference if it is a local or a network drive. So the simplest program (e.g. notepad or textedit) can access files anywhere. But I know, that a programmer can determine if the drive is local or networked. If (for whatever reason) he doesn’t want, he can check and if it’s not local refuse to use it. This might be the case of some copyprotection algorythms, which have to directly access and manipulate specific sectors on filesystems. For an ordinary program this is a limitation as if you nowadays write a program which cannot operated with a mouse. It makes absolutely no sense, it is boring and annoying. Despite the fact that all other programs (like Traktor, Serato, Rekordbox and (I think) really ANY other) work with network drives. This is not a cyber-feature. It is daily bread.
I am not able to try it on Apples because I only have Mavericks installed. Can someone tell me, if this strange behaviour is also present on the MacOS-Platform?
I am really very sad that the Denon Guys are ignoring me and many other users, who has requested this functionality. So I had to make a decision and as I mentioned in the beginning of that thread, the discussed flaw of the Engine Prime Software is a show-stopper. I spent a lot more money now, and bought to CDJ3000 and a DJM900NX2 and now I know: This was the right decision. Thank you Denon for pushing me in the right direction.
You can close this thread and delete my account here, because I will not need it anymore.
it doesnt work because the filenames become mangled in the database and eventually corrupt the database with dead links… its an internal Engine Prime bug that’s never been looked into or officially acknowledged.
+1 for accessing your files on a network drive.
The lack of this feature adds huge problems for anyone who wants to have a distributed music system and use denon dj products.
Other music library management programs handle this without problems.
Yes, but as this post is not in the section for formal “feature requests”, I believe it will never be considered (assuming the ones in the right section are considered )
Guys, the information that EP is not supporting “network shares” is just bollox, the simple way to work around this is demonstrated below.
As you will see EP is just made in a way to specifically not support network volumes but if you trick it into believing it runs from HDD normally - just works. There are no technical obstacles whatsoever to get it running. Let it settle for the moment.
This work around works for me and I am using MacOS.
Import files to from your usual location let’s say it is ~/Downloads/Music by dragging folder into your crate and let it analyse.
Move folder into network share, lets say its /Volumes/home/Music
Create a symlink to the network share inside your ~/Downloads folder by running: ln -s /Volumes/home/Music (from the terminal, a command line)
When you run ls (to list files) on this you will see Music@ → /Volumes/home/Music/
Open EP and continue working as usual
What should I make of it? A company that specifically does not allow in their product to use network shares, I could maybe pinpoint to the laziness of the software engineering team not to care about these feature as maybe(?), maybe they didn’t want people that are on wifi to have slow syncing speeds? The thing is that network volumes are no different to normal files as much as any software is concerned, everything is abstracted by the operating system itself, its just a yet another location in your file system.
It had to be made specifically to ignore network shares.
Ik tried your suggestion, but when I delete the files from the Mac HDD, also the files at the NAS are deleted. So the link works, but my idea is not to keep the files at the Mac HDD. Only on the NAS. Am I missing something?
I’m trying this but I think they’ve “fixed” the symbol link loophole (but maybe I’m doing it wrong!). The ironic thing is that I have my main mp3 collection on a RAIDed network drive which is pretty much corruption proof and I have to copy the entire thing to an SSD to the plug into the Mac in order to then have it accessible from EP.
Mount your network drive in MacOS (/Volumes/Tunes) [example],
Create a directory on your Desktop called Tunes,
Open Terminal and issue the following command:
ln -s /Volumes/Tunes/* /Users/ben/Desktop/Tunes/
Obviously use your own home directory name not mine (ben)
This will create a symbolic link for every track contained in the network volume ‘Tunes’, in the Tunes directory on your Desktop.
You can then drag and drop the symbolic linked tracks from the Tunes directory on your desktop into Engine DJ Desktop, it will analyse and play them as if they were local files.
This is the only way to get this to work on MacOS unfortunately. I believe in Windows you can just create a symbolic linked directory and by default the contents will also be symbolic links dynamically.
I don’t have a Prime device with a built in drive but you can certainly sync/export to an SD card/USB stick and play on a Denon device so I don’t see any reason why not.
Just to be clear I probably wouldn’t recommend using symbolic links on a Mac, I don’t personally use them. It’s too much of a faff and not dynamic, so you’d always be creating links for every new track you add. It might be worth while for bedroom only DJ’s with a huge music collection and not enough local storage but not really sustainable for a working DJ.
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