problem of red tracks (special characters) only on linked media player

Engine DJ Hardware Media Players
1

Hi everyone

I have loads of songs with special characters in the filenames and tags, and I never had the problem of red tracks on Engine OS before, with my Mac OS Journaled formatted external hard drive connected to a SC6000 media player. (Only when using sync manager to export!)

Now I have a new drive, an SSD, formatted Mac OS Journaled.

I plug the SSD in player 1, and everything seems fine. No red tracks. However, I now have red tracks showing up on the second media player that is linked to player 1 via ethernet cable.

That SSD has all my music (my main Engine/Serato library) on it. I don’t use Sync Manager. I don’t export to USB or other internal/external drives. I only use my dedicated, external music SSD.

I’m using the Serato to Engine import. I read that this seems to be the culprit. Before the change to SSD, though, I had also used the Serato library import feature (to have the cuepoints and grids imported) and then everything seemed to work.

I’m on firmware 4.3.3, and I tried downgrading to 4.3.2 but the problem persists.

Any clues? I would prefer not to change the problematic filenames. (Assuming this is related to special characters in filenames only, so not taking into account those special characters in metadata.)

2

Have you tried formatting to ExFat?

What happens if you don’t use the Serato import and add the tracks using the standard method?

3

Well, I have a clone of my music drive. It happens to be in ExFat format. The same problem occurs. The first media player is ok, the second and linked player has a lot of red tracks.

I tried adding the tracks using the standard method (just import without Serato import) on my Mac OS Journaled SSD. I lose my cuepoints and grid of course, but apart from that: no changes. Player two has red tracks again! (“Could not load via network.”)

Very weird. This should not be happening!

update:

I get two scenarios on the linked media player.

  1. adding files from a folder called [12”] = always red tracks (with or without Serato import)
  2. adding files with just an accent in the filename (and tags), e.g. Beyoncé = red tracks with Serato import only, so no problems if I import them directly.

For the life of me


4

It’s the syncing that is causing it.

I found a few years back that if I imported my library from Serato DJ then synced them to the drive in the manager I got the red tracks too.

The only option is to not pack them via the sync manager and manage them directly on the drive using drag and drop. It’s a pain but it’s the only way unfortunately.

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5

OK I understand, but I don’t use sync manager. The files haven’t been ‘packed’. I don’t export to another drive. I keep all my files on an external SSD. I never had red tracks before when this was my workflow. Now I only have red tracks on the player that is connected via the network cable.

I could abandon Serato and start using Engine DJ for beatgrids and cuepoints (not my preferred method), or I could change all the problematic filenames (I’m a bit autistic about that).

6

that does seem strange then. Maybe someone will be along to help a little more then. It’s a known issue with packed tracks but with networked tracks that were dragged and dropped it shouldn’t be.

7

Thanks for your help. Just to be clear, I did not drag and drop the files. So I did not use direct import in Engine. I did use Serato import. But I did not export after that.

To test, I dragged and dropped a problematic folder (containing the “ character), but I still had red tracks in Engine OS. That is indeed weird.

Update!

Here are my findings.

  • The “ character causes problems. (In filename or folder name)

  • The / character too.

  • folders that have a dot (.) at the end will cause an error

  • The tilde character (~) however is not causing any problems. (e.g. Sueño Latino in the filename)

  • As matter of fact, the other special characters are fine now! So, BeyoncĂ© is back!

    How? I did not just remove the songs from the database. I deleted the database, used Serato import again, and imported to the Engine DJ collection after analyzing the songs (to get the Serato beatgrids and cuepoints).

    So, I just had to change “ into ‘inch’ and slash (/) into dash (-) in my file names. I can live with that.

    We’re back in business!

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