I bought Serato’s SL1 when it first came out long ago and I never had any problems with it. Flash forward to 2021 and now i’m the proud new owner of some SC5000M’s. While I sing it’s praises, I also suffer in silence knowing full well that Engine DJ is completely awful. I just came here to say that. It’s really frustrating. I have only had it maybe a couple months and here’s my issues…
everything I have imported from itunes shows as duplicates. I do not have this issue in Serato DJ Pro. Can’t tell you how much time I have wasted trying to figure out the cause.
Updating the Itunes library is probably 50 times slower than serato. It’s not even close. Incredibly frustrating.
I had a long gig to play and one of my folders had 160 tracks in it. Only 140 would copy over to my playlist. No report or notification as to what tracks failed and why. Eventually I moved the tracks out of itunes and on to the same thumb drive as my playlists and everything copied over.
Simple tasks like dragging files from an itunes playlist to an Engine DJ playlist on my thumb drive are frustrating. I thought this worked before but it didn’t the last time i tried. I had to right click the itunes playlist and click import. Don’t know why a simple drag and drop wouldn’t work.
Bpm’s are mostly pretty accurate but sometimes the que points don’t match up to the beats. Never had this issue with serato.
I’m honestly just shocked by it still. What gives Denon community? How new is this software? Am I a new adopter and just need to ride it out a year or so?
Each of your questions (except the 16 year old thing) has been asked before and been answered. Take a look at the Search facility on the forum and you’ll find.
Anything can be better, and/but remember “better” means different things for different people.
Maybe all the answers to these questions are in the forum already, yeah, but that does not justify the fact that they are bugs or issues. The state of Engine DJ is really not very good.
I try to be not as aggressive as the OP, but I do share that Engine may not been developed by a really committed team of senior developers. They might have been outsourced, or very junior or whatever, but as a software it really shows symptoms of bad coding.
Every software has their bugs, but what I see in Engine is worrying and there are some issues that look to me like rookie mistakes (UI frozen due to Engine accessing the disk in the main thread, constant crashes in error paths, the fact that the released binary contains one folder with tests functionality that should not be there, wacky design of the database, etc)
You could argue that is normal that searching and navigating the library in the players is slower that, say Serato. But Engine runs on the computer, and compare its stability with other similar software.
As much as I like the players and the thing that Denon has designed, the execution in some areas (ie: Engine DJ software) is simply really buggy.
This could honestly be voted to the top of the Denon wish list ‘feature request voting’ - Rewrite platform from ground up. I’m sure all bugs are being looked at but the platform is ‘clunky’. Each platform has it quirks and things to work out during new releases (preffereably not in real time Denon). . . but it’s not supposed to feel hard to make things work within a workflow. You get a lot of ‘if you read this’ or ‘it’s still better than’ but I still feel Denon has the product hardware to out do any other manufacter involved in software based players. Serato user since SL1 days as well - migrated to Traktor, dabbled in DJPro AI (take a look at these forward thinkers) - They all do things very well. The only thing Denon does ‘better’ is have hardware that feels good (so very good) to play on. I get the argument so don’t event start ‘You dont’ have to have a laptop once your sort things out - just go play’ - it’s the wasted time spent and frustration of getting the library from A to B. ‘Just stream from Beatport or Dropbox’ - maybe try to head over to another engine and try the same service - it’s miles ahead with track sorting ect. The only thing the Denon’s do better in my opinion is make me feel better playing when I actually get around to playing. Not ditiching them. But Denon should go snipe under appreciated employees that have a fresh view and start from ground zero. What’s the turn around writing a dj software platform from the ground up?
Go google the time it took from when inMusic bought DenonDJ brand and when they released Engine Prime. Because that is what they did to Engine 1.5.2 → Engine Prime 1.0
Also, “your” unpaid interns just put out the EP 2.0.2 update so maybe things are moving forward…
Designing and developing great software is hard. its an iterative process that happens over time. Its all about focus prioritisation and trade offs about whats the most important user need thats needs solving.
The turnaround time and cost for writing software from the ground up is large. Thats why at first new software is released as a v1.0 - and grows from there. A full database rewrite thats just been delivered is a big deal, shows direction for the future and probably opens up opportunity for much of the things Engine is lacking when it comes to management.
Moving to denon Ive had much fewer ■■■ moments than with other platforms. Though direct & Seamless local synchronisation between my files stored in Apple Music, and my players’ storage, of library changes would be great. but sync is no small task to undertake and would take focus away from whatever else is on the backlog. Im sure getting this right its not far from the top, though, given the network capabilities.
In relative to others theres some catching up to do but its happening quicker than others developed their platforms.
They needed to start somewhere and whilst we shouldn’t bank our buying decisions on what may happen in the future theres clearly a dev team dedicated to the software and continuous improvement on Engine DJ is happening.
Ive bought Denon gear recently in large part because Im seeing regular updates to software. This is important in 2021. I was pleasantly surprised to be notified of an update today.
Oh do shut up! Build it ya f***in’ yourself. It’s more than capable for pro environments and the team are doing regular updates strengthening it week by week.
If you do happen to come across an issue and you feel strongly that it should be fixed, please bring it up in it’s own thread. While writing long posts titled “everything wrong with Engine” might be cathartic, it doesn’t really allow for other users to find and comment on specific issues.
As always - please keep the feedback coming. But remember to be respectful to all the forum members when doing so.
