I ran into a peculiar issue last week that other users DJs could encounter and wanted to share the solution that worked for me. I read through most of the Engine DJ FAQs and couldn’t find anything related to this.
TL;DR: The authenticated macOS user needs to have read & write permission to the root of the new external hard drive, which might not be the default.
Problems started to arise when I copied my external hard drive with my music to a new hard drive using macOS 14. The old hard drive used the Mac OS Extended file system and the new one used APFS Case-sensitive Encrypted.
To make the switch, I ejected the old external hard drive and renamed the new one to have the same name. MacOS uses names for volumes instead of letters like Windows. I verified that Apple Music continued to play the songs from the new drive and could add new ones to the collection.
Despite using a tool that made the two drives identical and giving Engine DJ access to removable volumes in macOS Settings, the Engine DJ software no longer recognized the new drive. It did not appear under the Drives view.
The real panic came when I noticed my track lists were mostly empty. Only the songs on the internal macOS hard drive appeared. It took me a while to figure out that I had to go to the “History Sessions” tab on the left and look at a previous date to find the hundreds of red songs indicating missing files.
The good news is that I manually relocated one song and all of the others from the same drive auto fixed themselves. I wouldn’t have to fix the songs one by one. Great!
The bad news was that Engine DJ thought the external HD was read-only. When I loaded a song from the external HD to the grid editor I’d get a message saying the file could not load because it was read-only. If I quit the app and restarted, the songs would go back to being missing.
This gets to the core issue. My macOS user account did not have read & write access to the external hard drive’s root directory even though the sub-directories did. I noticed something was off when I had authenticate each time I moved something to the root of the external hard drive in Finder.
As soon as I gave my macOS account the ability to read & write to the external hard drive’s root directory, I could once again fix the missing tracks, the drive appeared under Engine DJ > Drives, and everything would stick after restarting the app.
I’m hoping this stays fixed. I can provide additional details if anyone needs it.
