Hey all, I have been getting this error message upon trying to load some (not all) of my tracks into my Prime 4. The songs load perfectly fine in Engine Prime (just finished setting beat grids and cues/loops), however when I plug my external hard drive into my Prime 4 these songs fail to load. I read one other post with a similar issues with .flac files (mine aren’t, however), one of the comments mentioned deleting the tracks and reintroducing them. Basically just trying to get these tracks to work while keeping all of my beat grids and cue points intact as I spent most of this week getting everything complete and it’d be a real pain to have to redo all that work. Any insight would be awesome.
I’ve had this problem too i.e tracks play fine in EP but they prime 4 says “failed to load track”.
I got my tracks to load by removing the ID3 tags completely and then re-entering all the ID3 tags again. I don’t know if the tags were somehow corrupt or missing or incorrectly formatted but it worked for me.
If the file is working fine on the laptop, but fail to load on removable unit, the problem could be special characters. This is still an issue with the latest version.
This is a huge hurdle for any Laptop DJ converting from Serato or Virtual DJ. Isn’t this crucial for all other markets outside the US & UK?
Yes, to the above comments (@PKtheDJ “database location”, @djsimonse “special characters problem”). I’ve had both of those issues. In addition, I did have a case where a purchased aiff played fine on the desktop, but the SC6000 refused to load it with the “Failed to load track - file unavailable” message. I re-encoded the file with XLD (aiff->aiff) and it then worked.
As for the special characters issue, Engine Prime desktop supports the typical modern Windows and Mac file systems, but the players only support exFAT and FAT32. I don’t quite understand some of the Engine OS special characters issues as exFAT supports most special characters in filenames. Per Wikipedia: Allowed filename characters: all Unicode charactersexcept U+0000(NUL) through U+001F(US), / (slash), \ (backslash), : (colon), * (asterisk), ? (question), “ (double quote), < (less than), > (greater than) and | (pipe).
This is a resurrected older post, maybe Engine OS does handle those Unicode characters now? But, I learned to cleanse my filenames of those early on.
Well, the problems is still here, even with the latest version. I think this matters for every Mixed Format DJ’s who likes World Music.
I want all my files that works on the Laptop to work on the Prime as well. For now I’m sticking to play with Laptop until it really works without limitations.
Yes, that’s true, that is another angle. But, SQL is certainly capable of handling accented characters. Perhaps there is a character code page issue. Sync does correct some exFAT unsupported characters when those files are written to the performance drive.
This article explains the issues with Unicode characters in filenames. It’s complicated, especially when Engine DJ has desktop and player OS installed versions.
Hmm. I made an accent test folder with filenames and ID3 data containing á é í ú ß ø Ä.
My system: macOS Monterey. Engine Desktop and SC6000 on 3.2.0.
The files played and displayed with no issues, except see item 1. Engine DJ is flexible as to how you can export for the players and I tested the following 3 methods.
Engine DJ desktop built-in sync. Engine DJ syncs to an /Engine Library folder on the exFAT drive with /Database2 and /Music subfolders. The music is reorganized by artist / album in the /Music folder. The file with the artist “Gwén Guthrie” was placed in an “Unknown Artist” folder rather than “Gwen Guthrie” or “Gwén Guthrie”. It still played. For the other accented artist, “Softmal, LLølita, Lucenamusic (=Sister Sledge)”, it made a folder so titled.
Connect the unit over the network to the desktop computer running Engine desktop.
Copy the /Engine Library folder and music folders to an exFAT drive. The drive is a mirror of your desktop computer with your music remaining organized the way you have it set up. You must make sure the relative paths of your /Engine Library folder and the ones containing your music stay the same. This method can be faster, as it allows you to use a backup program to refresh it and only touches files that have changed. If your music is not on the same drive as the Engine DJ program, the relative paths are not likely to work.
macOS users, in Terminal, this will list the files with extended characters from the current folder through all subfolders. Terminal usually launches in your personal root, so you could change the first dot to Music to navigate there.