I understand the need for SD cards and such to be formatted to exfat to use with the Prime series players but when setting up an (SSD) external hard drive as a backup for those music files, wouldn’t I just format the external drive according to my Mac preferences: APFS format with a GUID scheme? And would the backup of my Engine music on that external SSD still be easily compatible for use on my Prime Go once I copy it to my SD card or would I have to do some adjusting?
Assuming that your music library lives on your Mac’s internal storage then it will be using APFS already. So making a backup of that library to an external SSD formatted to APFS will make no difference. As long as your SD card is formatted to EXFAT when you export your Engine DJ playlists to it then it will be readable by your Prime device.
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Actually the music library I’d be working with is directly from my SD card which is formatted to EXFAT.
I think i understand what you’re trying to achieve. Having the SSD as a backup for your mac music but also playable through the Prime Go?
If so then format the SSD to Exfat, the mac should still be able to back up your music collection to it (iirc most NAS drives are in the FAT format).
The ideal solution would be to have 2 SSDs, one for each purpose, then you have an extra layer of backup.
So your music library is only on your SD card? - (That’s a bad idea, but I guess you know that since you’re looking into backups.)
How big is your music collection out of interest?
Ideally you would want your library stored on your MacBook if it’s not too big and you have the free disk space that is. Then you would use Engine DJ Desktop to arrange your playlists and export them to your SD Card. Then use your External SSD to backup your library which is stored on your MacBook.
If you don’t have the space on your MacBooks internal storage then you could use the SSD as your main library and export playlists to SD via Engine DJ Desktop while the SSD is plugged into your MacBook. The issue with this way is the SSD is a single point of failure, albeit you would have the SD card to salvage your music from should the SSD die. And it’s a lot better than just having the SD card.