Am I missing something? Let’s say someone gives me a USB with some songs on them, and I don’t have my computer. So I want to add these songs to my playlist to make sure i don’t forget to play them later in the night. How do I add this new media to a playlist?
You can’t do it. For now it is not possible to transfer tracks between different remote collections. You cannot copy the MP3 file from your friend’s USB stick to your collection. To do this you must necessarily use a computer with Engine DJ.
While you can still play that track directly from the console: you select that USB stick, then navigate inside it with the console menu and then load the track to play into the player. At that point it will be analyzed and you will get BPM and key. However, it cannot be added to your collection playlist.
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Thanks for your reply. I didn’t quite phrase my question correctly. Never mind the copying to a new collection part. Lets say I show up to play a wedding. The groom says, “forget the music you brought, you’ll play my music instead, here is my HD full of wedding tunes. I want you to play these songs in this order.” OK so I stomp my own collection to pieces in a fit of rage, and then connect the groom’s HD to my PG, and find the requested songs in the folders view. Now I need to make a playlist to make sure I get the song order correct. I cant write the list down with pen and paper because it’s 2079 and paper is forbidden, and we forgot how to use pens anyways.
Is this still a no-can-do?
Workarounds
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Did you try adding the tracks to prepare folder?
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Bring a laptop to prepare the foreign HD.
Thanks for the reply.
For this query, the rule is no laptop allowed. It’s absurd that I would need to bring a laptop for the very basic task of adding a new track to a playlist. If using a laptop is considered a workaround, I could also consider using a pioneer unit as a workaround!
Yes I can add tracks to the prepare list, but (shockingly) you can’t create a playlist from the prepare list.
If they added the “make playlist from prepare list” function, then they’d also have this issue solved.
I have a few questions Colin, why no computer? most people in the world have a computer these days, and how do you go about purchasing and downloading digital music?
It seems like you’re just making the whole process of setting music up incredibly difficult for yourself by not just having a basic computer to organise the music. You mentioned on another thread about Needing a Rekordbox USB, how do you analyse that to get it ready for CDJs? and if you aren’t, do you understand fully what you’re missing out on by not having properly analysed tracks?
Hi STU-C, thanks for reading.
It’ beside the point, but no, most people in the world don’t own personal computers these days. (A quick search suggests something like 40-50% have access to a computer in household).
The prime go can do a full track analysis without a computer, so I’m not missing out there.
It seems we don’t have comprehensive playlist creation abilities on the PG. That’s too bad since the point of going standalone is to not use the computer. There are so many reasons why someone might want to go that route, including the possibility of not owning a laptop, or perhaps not wanting to bring their very expensive laptop along to their wedding gig or worldwide tour, etc. In those circumstances, a user should still be able to add new tracks to a playlist.
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But how are you buying those tracks? you have to purchase, download and store them somewhere, with backups for redundancy and that requires a computer.
And I should rephrase, most people with an interest in maintaining a piece of tech will and should own a computer, we have 5 in our house, with 2 humans.
The Prime units on board analysation was only ever there to serve the purpose of migrating RB users into the eco system when they are faced with Prime gear at gig. If you speak to or listen to advice from any of the Inmusic devs and experts they will tell you that managing your music inside Engine desktop is by far the most efficient and reliable way of doing it.
As a long term Serato and Rekordbox user, Engine was/is just another piece of software I can easily fit into my workflow, and I did when I bought a Prime 2 a couple of years back… I run all 3 concurrently on my computer and have databases that cover all three for differing situations I find myself in when DJing.
My advice to save yourself lots of frustration is just build your library in Engine desktop then export it to your chosen drive with everything in place. The alternative is to continue trying to manage it in the device then regularly visiting here to ask why its not doing XYZ etc.
Even if someone’s music is managed on a PC at home, when they leave home, they shouldn’t need to bring a computer along just to add a new track to a playlist.
Furthermore, one should be able to add new tracks to a playlist while DJing on their standalone device.
Anyways, the original question has been answered… it can’t be done.
But I appreciate your input. I’m impressed you’re able to run rekordbox, engine, and serato!
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I’m in no way telling you to copy my workflow, or that it’s good, but I’ll explain how it works as I find it quite easy to manage and it may be of use to you.
Arrange folders on computer by genre then A-Z of albums, i precede the genre folders with a 0 so they always appear at the top.
I then arrange my playlists in RB to mirror that folder layout, then crates in Serato are also laid out this way.
When I add new music it’s generally into the genre folders 99% of the time so I’m only ever updating about 15 folders. Occasionally I add a new album to which I’ll create a new playlist/crate.
How does this translate to Engine, I manage my music in Serato first then use the library sync option in Engine desktop to update the collection there (RB has the same option)
The next step is to then drag and drop all my new music from each of the Serato playlists that sit in engine and drop them into their corresponding Engine library playlists, I usually use the ‘date added’ column to identify which tracks are new ones. Then it’s a case of using sync manager to update my SSD that’s inside the Prime 2.
I’ll post a couple of pics below to illustrate how it works.
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This one shows my music folder alongside Rekordbox playlists, note how they match.
The next one shows my Engine library with the SSD drive window open. Note the Serato logo on the left, clicking that accesses the Serato library where I can use the library sync to update it before dropping the new tracks into my Engine playlists.
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STU, something tells me you’re a little more organized of a person than I.
It’s going to take me a minute to absorb this
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Haha I wouldn’t go that far, my GF will tell you that’s the last thing I am 
I’ve been using Serato for about 15yrs so decided on the genre/album thing way back, I then quickly realised that mirroring it in my folders made tracks easier to group on my PC. Then I started getting gigs where I had to use CDJs with other DJs, so not wanting to be that annoying guy who turns up and tries to wire into the deck setup I figured I’d start using RB with USB sticks and it ended up being fairly easy because I just repeated the playlist names from Serato and loaded my music in folder by folder.
The Engine ‘integration’ option is the key though, you can use RB as your master organiser then sync into Engine with it, the only downside is it doesn’t update your engine library playlists, that has to do be done manually. This is easy though as you can just work your way through each playlist you’ve added music to, highlight the new tracks then drag them into the Engine library and drop them into the playlist of the same name (dragging them over the engine logo on the left will switch your playlist view from RB to Engine)
I’ll try and link a YouTube video where it explains it.
This video from 19 mins explains it, it doesn’t look like RB plays as nicely as Serato does but it does let you import an XML if you’re using the right version of RB. I’d say do an initial upload of the RB library then maybe manually update both software with new music.
One other thing I try not to do it too much, so I’ll say stick to once a month where I consolidate my music and add it everywhere, as it’s often the same amount of time to do 10 and 100 tracks.