Thank you for taking the time to share this information @Jason_Cassidy ! I too get very frustrated with Engine DJ, though the dev team doesn’t seem to prioritize making it much better. That’s what it seems, at least, where there are bugs that are years old. 15 hours is not entirely acceptable and I can understand how one can blame Engine for being slow, however I like to look at the entire system and the DJ’s workflow as part of the equation. There are so many factors that play a role into how well Engine works, including Engine’s own limitations.
Let’s tackle a few things.
Copying music from one drive to another using Explorer:
When you copy files using Windows Explorer (via drag and drop, etc.), the operating system is basically writing the files from the source storage to the destination. It typically does this at the fastest possible bandwidth each device can allow. Some of the overhead in copying files includes updating the filesystem allocation tables (This is where FAT comes from - File Allocation Table). And when you copy music, there are tiny periods where little writes happen (allocation table updates), and longer periods where large writes happen (writing the data for the songs). Copying files with the operating system is typically fine tuned and as fast as possible, full stop.
Exporting using Engine DJ: This is a lot more complicated of a process and is way slower than the above, for a lot of reasons. When you export, there are a lot of database reads and writes that need to happen for each of the file transfers, in addition to the OS file copy process like stated above. It’s for this reason, exports are generally slower.
If you have bad media, the above processes can take exponentially longer, as reading/writing cells that are going bad (but not entirely bad according to the S.M.A.R.T. specs) will increase latency.
Some questions for you:
- What make & model are your external drives?
- How large is your host computer’s main Database
C:\Users\[Your Username]\Music\Engine Library\m.db.
- How large is your main performance Database?
D:\Music\Engine Library\m.db
- When is the last time you have run a Database Cleanup (with your performance drive connected)?
- When you do an export, have you looked at Task Manager to see if CPU utilization is high or perhaps Disk Utilization for
D:\is above normal? - Would you be willing to share your host computer’s Main database with me? Don’t worry, this won’t leak your music, just metadata about your music. I wonder if there is a limitation you may have run into?
Lastly, you’re not the only person experiencing slow exports. If you search this forum you’ll find posts like this: