Migrating from Serato on a mac

I just purchased a Prime 4 that will be arriving on Wednesday. I decided to go ahead and prepare my library within Engine so it is ready to load when it arrives. While I absolutely love the performance and library management aspects of the program so far it has proven to be a pretty time-consuming task to migrate over to the new platform.

The majority of my “go-to tracks” are have loaded on my MacBook Pro’s internal SSD, these are mostly tracks that I have downloaded in the last 2 years as well as tracks that I play frequently at events. I did this so that I could load serato faster without having to load up my entire library up front (aprox 1.5TB) at each and every event. The rest of my library is on an external hard drive that I can plug in and access on demand within serato. This hard drive is formatted as "Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)… I think you can see where this is going… :joy:

I was able to copy my primary crates from serato within the program FLAWLESSLY, I was very impressed by how simple it was to do. What I found was that over time I have added files from my hard drive to my regularly used crates within Serato and now random songs are missing from my crates. So now I am having to go in manually and:

  1. Partition & Format a part of my external HDD to ExFat
  2. Copy my ENTIRE music library to the new drive (4 hours)
  3. Import the new folder to Engine
  4. Add songs as needed to the crates

I am hoping that all of my hard work pays off and will be worth it in the long run. I just wanted to put this information out there in hopes that the software will be compatible with ALL types of formatted storage devices like Serato.

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I hope you have a back up of your entire Serato library

I think HFS is read only with the players.

Have you considered combining all your music into one external drive

I use a 4tb Samsung 960 Evo SSD. My library is around 2.7TB, i do videos with Serato. It’s also formatted as HFS and serato loads up in secs.

You can get a second drive for your Prime 4.

If you are under 2tb you can look into ssd options as well. Then format this drive into exfat.

How u use this new drive is entirely up to you…you can clone your main drive to it or export as needed to it.

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I purchased a 1T SSD to install that I will copy the files to. I’m just getting the leg work out of the way ahead of time. Not supporting OSX format alienates a huge percentage of serato users that use Apple computers.

You can use exFat on MacOS.

I don’t think you are understanding what the complaint is… I have an existing storage device that is formatted OSX. I can not use that with prime or load that onto engine. I had to copy all of the files to a newly formatted partition first as opposed to plug & play.

Why do you want to do it twice?

Simply run the HFS based Serato library through Engine prime desktop for now. HFS libraries are read n write by the Engine Prime desktop software.

When you plug it in, you may get the message that the drive is not supported

My main library is HFS (I dont get the non compatibility message because it’s a thunderbolt 2 drive. If I use the USB to connect I do get the message)

Then do the add to collection step as well step.

It wont make duplicates dont worry.

When you get your 1tb SSD just format that to exfat as intended

Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone that HFS to the exFat SSD.

No need to start partitioning your original HFS SSD.

You can try Musconv for mac. Thanks

You must have a usb pb because if it is hfs OsX it works in Engine Prime, it depends on the hd directories.

But after you will have to copy your content into another exfat/fat32 disk

I have the same problem here. I have MacBook Pro and all my music library on a external hard drive( hfs format) because it works with time machine for backup. So Engine prime software is not compatible, so I’m stuck. I can’t transfer my library to the mixer internal hard drive. Please any little help will be appropriate. Thank you.