Hey, last night I turned my Prime 4+ after having exported tracks to it like I do almost every day. When it booted, it told me that the library was corrupted. I was hoping it was a fluke, so I restarted the Prime 4+ and when it rebooted there was no library at all to be found.
I had an event shortly, so I couldn’t re-export my entire library, so I used Engine DJ Desktop as a source instead of the internal HDD. While it wasn’t as great of an experience as mixing from local sources, this was a great backup and I appreciate it being available as an option. Thank you.
One thing I noticed was when I went to preview a track, it would download the entire track. What blew my mind was if I decided to load the track… it had to download the entire track again. Honestly, the whole “Having to download to preview” was a huge stepback and is the biggest reason Engine DJ Desktop as a source will not work for me long-term, but until a faster streaming solution is created, please at least cache any downloaded track so we don’t have to download them again immediately.
There are countless services online, multiple hops from me, on servers out-of-state which can stream music within a fraction of a second of me hitting “Play”, allowing me to seek anytime on a multi-hour track, so I have faith that Denon can discover a way to implement expedient preview over a 10GB connection from a source on the same network switch eventually, so I’ll keep checking back for that.
I think it would make a lot of sense to create a cache or buffer somewhere that tracks can be stored, when preview or loaded, and check that cache first before downloading the track. Sure, maybe it only cache’s one track, but I think it would make sense if you could cache a few. Maybe I load up a track, realize I want to play another first, so I load up a second track, but then I want to load up the first track again. I can see that being not-so-uncommon of a scenario. I understand that if I preview a track, and then load up 16 other tracks, I might have to re-download to preview the first track, or load it, but I find it especially awkward that if I preview a track and then immediately load it into a deck, there are two downloads instead of one.
If there is some required limitation due to streaming services, please keep those restrictions limited to streaming services and not Engine DJ Desktop source.
In addition to this oddness, once you have a track loaded in a deck, you can no longer preview the track. I think this is a bug in the way that loading a track and previewing a track may be handled very differently, and since the track is already downloaded and loaded, it doesn’t allow the track to be downloaded for preview, but really, this should just reference the same cache/storage/entity and if the track is loaded, I damn sure should be able to preview it.
Another thing I noticed is that when you switch Playlists and during searching, instead of a message showing “Loading Playlist” or “Loading…”, the user is presented with the message “No Tracks Found”. I got used to it after I realized it was lying and just needed some time to load, but it really freaked me out at first since I just had lost the Engine DJ OS library, thinking maybe the corruption occurred with my Engine DJ Desktop library as well. When Engine DJ OS is loading a Playlist, proper messaging should be displayed and “No Tracks Found” should only be shown if… there are actually no tracks.
Again, I was very glad to have this as an option, but I found a few things in working with Engine DJ Desktop as a Source that I felt I should mention.
that keep popping up…