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.
