Engine Prime Crashes When Refreshing iTunes or Serato Libraries

Legacy Products Engine PRIME
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About creating a backup: All the relevant Engine Prime databases are stored in the folder named “Engine Library” (EL)

This folder can be found at:

  • your user level Music folder (~/Music/)
  • At the root of every drive that contains tracks for Engine Prime, including e.g. the Prime 4 internal drive.

To Backup:

  1. Quit Engine Prime (important!)
  2. duplicate the EL folders (all of them!)
  3. rename the duplicates so you can easily identify them (e.g. EL backup 2020/04/11)

In case of troubles:

  1. Quit Engine Prime (important!)
  2. Rename all the EL folders to something else e.g. “Engine Library BAK”
  3. Start Engine Prime, all should be fine, with an empty collection if this step fails it’s your OS or Engine Prime that is the problem, not the databases
  4. Quit Engine Prime
  5. Rename 1 “Engine Library BAK” back to “Engine Library”
  6. restart Engine Prime, if EP starts, then repeat the previous step with another BAK folder the one that fails contains the broken database.

To restore from a backup

  1. Locate the problematic EL folder (see the in case of troubles part)
  2. Rename the duplicate of the duplicated folder from “how to create a backup” for the troubled EL folder,
  3. rename that duplicate of the duplicate to “Engine Library”
  4. start Engine Prime, it should be at the restored state

Now regarding your iTunes import to Engine Prime. The current version of EP has 2 limitations:

  • it’s all or nothing, which can make it take some time
  • If a track is already part of the EP collection and you changed its tags in iTunes/Music.app then those changes are NOT imported.

If you are on MacOS there is an alternative, which does not have those limitations and it automatically maintains 4 levels of backups for your databases. See this tutorial for more

And this might be of interest to you as well (maintaining the exact Serato STATIC grid/BPM among many other extra features)

In the scheduled Ask Me Anything I’ll be doing a demonstration of:

  • conversion from Serato (and I can throw iTunes in the mix) to a Denon Prime performance drive
  • Set some extra cues/loops on the SC5000 (could be any Prime player incl the Prime 4 or Prime Go)
  • Convert everything from that performance drive, including the cues and loops set on the player all back to the original Serato collection I started with.