I’m having constant problems exporting playlists from Engine DJ to a USB drive.
Every single time it’s a different issue.
The synchronization often gets stuck (even when exporting around 6 GB). When this happens, Engine DJ becomes completely unresponsive and won’t close — not even via Task Manager.
After that, it’s impossible to relaunch Engine DJ, and always Windows won’t even restart properly. I’m forced to shut down the PC manually.
When I finally manage to export everything to the USB drive including stems, on the next synchronization the stems are simply gone.
I’m honestly spending hours and hours trying to complete what should be a very simple task.
I’m extremely disappointed with these issues and I’m already starting to regret choosing Denon over Pioneer because of this instability.
Is anyone else experiencing the same problems? Any real solution or explanation?
Buenas, Marco, a mi me funciona todo bastante bien, estaría bien saber la versión de EngineDJ que usas y tambien características de tu ordenador, si es un disco normal o SSD, en que formato esta el USB donde lo estas copiando y la versión de Windows.
I had a pretty similar problem this week. I think it’s from a recent Windows11 update. Maybe this solution helps others.
The problem
Windows 11 laptop (HP)
Engine DJ exports to USB/SD card would freeze after some time
Windows Explorer also became unresponsive
Downloads to the internal disk stopped working
Browser still worked (so the system looked “half alive”)
Reboot temporarily fixed it, until the next large export
NTFS checks and SMART status showed no errors, which made this problem very confusing.
The root cause
After extensive troubleshooting (with help from ChatGPT), the issue turned out to be Windows 11 NVMe power management.
Windows aggressively puts NVMe SSDs into low-power PCIe states.
Under heavy, long-lasting write workloads (like large Engine DJ exports), the NVMe controller sometimes fails to wake up correctly, causing I/O deadlocks. No crash, no error — everything just waits forever.
This explains why:
The system worked fine for years
The problem only appeared during large exports
A reboot temporarily fixed it
The fix (worked 100% for me)
Disable PCIe power saving:
Open Control Panel → Power Options
Click Change plan settings on your active plan
Click Change advanced power settings
Set:
PCI Express → Link State Power Management → Off
Hard disk → Turn off hard disk after → Never
Reboot
After this the system remained fully stable.
Conclusion
This is not an Engine DJ bug and not a corrupted disk.
It’s a Windows 11 + NVMe power-management issue that only shows up under professional-level write workloads.
If you’re exporting large libraries on Windows 11 and experience freezes:
Disable PCIe Link State Power Management.
Hopefully this saves someone days of frustration.
Prompt you can give another user to get started with ChatGPT
You can literally paste this into ChatGPT:
“I’m using Engine DJ on Windows 11. Large exports to USB or SD card freeze after some time, Windows Explorer becomes unresponsive, but the system doesn’t crash and works again after reboot. NTFS and SMART checks show no errors. Can you troubleshoot this step by step and focus on storage, NVMe drivers, and power management?”
That prompt should immediately steer ChatGPT toward:
I had similar problems with Windows 11. Not with Engine DJ and large exports via USB, but with audio streams … I had pops and clicks in the signal … deactivating all power-saving options was the way to go. There were settings in the Device Manager (which is different from the Control Panel), which allowed Windows to shut down USB connections somehow to save energy … for example, if you click on USB Root Hub, there is a tab Power Management with power options such as Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power … hope this helps somebody.
I have no idea on what USB device you use but bare in mind that a good USB drive makes a lot of difference. Probably something you are aware of, but just saying…
In Task Manager you can check the Drive activity. This will tell you if Engine is still reading and/or writing to the USB drive and at what speed. If it is, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait to let it finish to avoid corruption. If you see speeds around 30MB/s you are using USB 2.0 drives, this will take ages.
For the best performance on throughput you can use NVME external drives over USB-C. This will make synchronisations much faster. I get speeds up to 900MB/s, small sidenote on this. NVME external drive seem to last shorter then expected <12 months. Not a big problem for me, I’ve got several spare ones, but just to tell you my experience.
Perhaps this helps as a real solution and might be an explanation.
Disable PCIe Link State Power Management.