So today I installed Engine OS 2.4 on my Mac and my SC6000. The biggest feature for me was the supposed support for HFS+, which would hopefully fix this ridiculous bug with special characters in file names such as é or ö or ø. How naive!
I formatted a drive to HFS+ and started Engine DJ on my Mac: this drive is not supported, please reformat to FAT or FAT32. Really? What’s the point with HFS+ support if your main sync tool does not know that the SC6000 supports that file system now?
I have no problem with the characters you indicate whether with my Prime GO or Prime 4 and yet I have a lot of music with different special characters.
The only problem that arises is during a search in the player or the software where it will be necessary to write the title and the artist correctly, if they contain any.
I don’t know, if you are talking about this kind of problem or not?
As for the HFS+ format, I couldn’t help you because all my SSD or SD card and USB key are in Exfat format, which allows me to access the content of the media on any machine (PC/Mac)
This looks to be a feature for those outside the engine ecosystem. For example a rekordbox user wants to plug in their usb stick which is in the hfs format into an engine dj flagship unit, now they can.
These kind of users will probably never use the desktop version anyway.
Well that’s good for you, for me and many others these problems are real. I have lots of tracks on my Mac with umlauts and accents, and every single one of them cannot be read by the SC6000 when those special characters are in the file name. I have tested this with a bunch of tracks from Niconé. The artist tag has an é, the file name an e, and it works. If the tag is e and the file name é, it does not, if both are é then also not. Same for ø or ä or ü or Å, or ?.
This is an artifact of how Engine DJ stores the file name reference - they are all corrupted and not matching the real file name. For example a track called “Hands on…” is in a directory named “Hands on___” on the disk. And other mixups.
That’s not the point of this post, I was just hoping that the support of a more modern and MacOS native file system would fix this referencing.
The issue is that the matching version of the software refused to sync music to a USB stick that is supposed to be supported by the SC6000, formatted with HFS+. So while the player supports it, the software one is supposed to use with the player does not.
The software does not allow synching to a HFS+ drive, it always throws an error when selecting the drive. Lexicon does the same, seems they implemented a FS check before sync.
The idtag must have a universal iso-8859-1 and have a UTF-8 and Mp3 in id3v23 version.
I use Jaikoz to normalize the idtag of my Mp3 files and ZERO problems with SDJ Pro, DJay Pro and Engine Prime / Engine Dj.
A friend has 2x SC5000M and he does like me and he does not encounter any problem, it would be strange if it was only a problem for the SC6000.
Special characters to avoid in folder name/title or in filename or artist, title are
: / ° @ # " ; % , . _ < > §
it will also be necessary to avoid putting a space before .mp3 or .m4a and the same at the end of the name (title) of the folder , Wave files is limited to filename, it does not contain idtag
the problem with special characters is most commonly encountered with Windows PCs.
My music collection (not performance drive) is APFS. When I plug it in I get the warning but I dismiss it and I’m able to use it with Engine DJ desktop…I’m not exporting to the drive.
Did you test the HFS+ support by creating a drive with rekordbox and even seeing if it works.
If that works, then perhaps your observation is an oversight and you should raise a bug report.
My main drive is also HFS+/APFS and that works fine as a library drive. It’s the Engine sync manager that complains. The SC6000 itself has no issue with the drive as far as I can tell.
I have all my files as AIFF, which I run through Platinum Notes and then convert to ALAC (m4a) with XLD - this is set to UTF-8 encoding. I can reproduce that it is the filename and not the the tags. When I manually fix filenames from let’s say é to e, they work. It’s just not practical to do this for all the songs that I have, and I’d expect better from a $1,500 piece of hardware!
**HFS+ support is only available for the latest generation of flagship Media Players. This addition has been added to support DJs outside of the Engine DJ ecosystem in professional performance environments.
This means it’s there to support Rekordbox users that have their library on a drive, it’s not full HFS+ support for Engine DJ and other devices
Ha ha, yes, exactly right. It’s a helpful fallback if you turn up to a gig without considering the required drive format for Engine OS devices (with a Rekordbox drive).
It’s possible that if the feature is well adopted that it could be rolled out further (other devices/extended format) support in future.
Yes, opening the files directly via the “Files” tab on the SC6000 works - it is their database that causes these issues by referencing the files in a wrong way. However, this makes their whole Engine ecosystem useless, if I cannot use the desktop software to prep lists and tracks reliably. Only now we got proper beatgridding on device, but I do not see myself manage playlists on device, or my entire collection.
Managing in rekordbox is only a half-baked solution, as these tracks still need to be analysed onboard. Their RB library support does not include the beatgrid.