Personally, I didn’t buy the R.S.One solely for its supposedly built-in stems.
I bought it for the following reasons, which are important to me:
1 - Because it has rotating platters (Having started in '92 with SL1200s, this standalone player was an obvious purchase for me, given the vinyl feel).
2 - A 2-deck design with the option to install an internal SSD.
3 - It’s equipped with a more powerful processor and more RAM. This allows for unparalleled navigation and responsiveness compared to what’s currently available on the market.
4 - Higher quality faders than any other standalone player.
5 - Customizable 10-band EQ (Very useful when playing in venues with fixed active speakers that lack EQ, or when using active column speakers).
6 - The ability to add effects to the mic inputs.
7 - Anti-feedback.
8 - FX stems (once stems created beforehand with EDJ Desktop have been exported).
9 - Stems that can work with trims (once stems created beforehand with EDJ Desktop have been exported).
10 - Shortcut for acapella/instrument stems (once stems created beforehand with EDJ Desktop have been exported).
Given the technical specifications of the R.S.One, I suspected that the built-in stems were still a bit of a letdown. Stem creation will likely be done via Wi-Fi connection and will take a maximum of one minute per file; at least, that would be the maximum required for it to be usable live.
But Pioneer never promises future features!
It doesn’t integrate many new features, a few, but without ever announcing them in advance, unlike Denon! Denon presents things in its spoilers even knowing that some probably can’t be integrated.
That’s the difference, and then you’re surprised Denon users complain about it!
We have bugs that still haven’t been fixed, things from 2022/2023.
Databases suddenly corrupted for no reason!
I had to rebuild the library twice, both times manually.
Waves on the controller that get misaligned.
Console that slows down after three hours.
What are we talking about?
It’s supposed to be on board. It won’t be fast though, based on how long it takes for MPCs to do it (same CPUs). It’s not “real time” i.e. 3 mins for a 3 min song - it’s slower.
Well that’s not really acceptable then. Well not what I imagined anyway.
I mean a basic M1 Macbook Air with 8gb RAM does them around 10x and that’s even considered slow nowadays.
But since it’s been radio silence from the company we don’t know for sure anyway.
Have to say if this doesn’t pan out as expected the RS1 will certainly be my last In-Music product. Between the unresolved bugs and delays to advertised features it’s not a great customer experience at all.
Except that the spoilers for the Prime players’ stems were made by influencers/Alpha or Beta testers, not by Denon.
If the announcement had been made with an official operating system, I would have understood the anger. So, if these people had an Alpha version in their possession, the development wasn’t finalized.
There were still risks of performance, quality, and stability issues as Alpha or Beta XY versions were released, depending on what could be fixed, before an official release. In this case… I don’t blame Denon/inMusic, although they should have told these influencers:
“Please note that this is only an experimental version, so please indicate that Prime players might eventually have integrated stems, but that at this time, when we present these features, it’s only a test version. We’ll tell you more later.”
But the best thing would have been not to talk about it at all to avoid the expectations and anger of people frustrated by not seeing this feature appear in Prime players.
you can save room already, you do not have to create/save stems locally on your laptop, export your library to the external, then select the tracks ON the external drive to create and save the stem info, this will save stems only on the external, not your laptop
In the comments section of the Rane S1 video they put out, recently Rane has been saying “Very soon” as far as the release goes so fingers crossed.
with that being said, i am very happy with the unit, I came from 20+ years of strictly Pioneer gear and took a lot for me to come over to Rane and i do not regret it at all, I have no issues/bugs and even if there were a few, Pioneer has the same issues too with releasing buggy gear and using the buyers as the testers pretty much to report them. I had a CDJ2000NXS on release date i couldn’t even use for 6 months because of a bug of it locking that started happening weeks after purchase that they finally fixed almost a year later, thank go i didnt sell my previous 2000’s
I dont know why so many people are returning it, i have a few friends that bought the unit and love it, use it every weekend on gigs as standalone.
My only gripe in this entire changeover from Pioneer ro Rane/Denon is Engine DJ on mac is the worst POS software i have ever used for syncing drives, Rekordbox wins on that end hands down. I wish they would improve it and fix the many bugs in the siftware end
According to an influencer, a little over a year ago, they tested an Alpha or Beta X version of the OS on the P4+ and managed to create a stem in 1 minute 30 seconds for a file almost 4 minutes long. However, the audio quality was terrible, which is probably why the creation of embedded stems was abandoned—the process was too long and the sound quality was far too poor.
So, I figured that with a more recent player, it would be possible to create a high-quality stem in 1 minute, or maybe 1 minute 30 seconds. Stem creation would involve an online sampler that would handle the processing via a Wi-Fi connection, but it would still be somewhat unreliable. Sorry if I’m talking nonsense.
for me personally i don’t get the hang up on onboard stems creation, yes it would be nice if you’re early and preparing a set but i would rather build it ahead of time in EDJ so its ready on track load and not have to load a track, decide i may use stems on it and have to wait for it to build, either way it is going to take up room on your external drive so just take the main playlists you use and pre-stem them,
again, i am sure the workflow is different for other users but i unless stems is ready immediately on track load or it builds in like 2 seconds when i load a track, then the onboard stems is kinda useless for me, again, just my outlook and opinion for my workflow
I think the “Sync Manager” feature isn’t quite finished yet.
Personally, I do everything by drag and drop and I never have any problems!
My library is organized as a tree. I have a root folder in “Musics” on my Mac. The root folder is called "DJ” and it contains about thirty subfolders sorted by “Genre”, which in turn contain subfolders sorted by “Artist.”
I simply drag my "DJ” folder into the “Collection” folder in Engine Desktop, and all the content is generated. I then scan it folder by folder, and once the scan is complete, I drag the "DJ” folder back into the “Collection” folder in “Drive”.
It takes me no more than 15 minutes, including analysis, for 92GB (almost 9000 tracks).
Why the delay? Well for starters we’ve had the MIDI 2.0 issues for several months now, still ongoing, so presumably resources have been diverted from the non essential stuff.
OK maybe there’s been no official statement to say as much - but do we really need one? Seems fairly obvious to me. Algoriddim are waiting on a firmware update to complete their support, and that hasn’t happened either.
The “Sync Manager” has always been a misnomer. Early Engine DJ was drag and drop, but people complained and wanted something better, so we got that - and it hasn’t been touched since. Much like the “sampler”.
That’s why I do it the other way and create the DB directly on the drive. I believe from what I have read that Sync Manager has never actually fully worked properly.
So many workarounds, so you can see why people new to Engine get frustrated and return the units.
it also messes up the drive if you cancel an export, i decided i need to do other work first so cancelled an export of 20 playlists, when i went to do it again, it duplicates all the files on the drive and doubles the amount of space because it does not know to pick up where it left off
My sync manager stopped working twice! And when it doesn’t work, it only exports the songs, not the playlists! The last time I tried to resolve the issue via chat with in-music support,
but after almost three hours they couldn’t resolve the issue, and they wanted to open a ticket for me.
After that, I found the solution myself.
The database gets corrupted, and therefore there’s no way to export the playlists. It’s absurd.
To solve the problem, you need to create a playlist in the library, but using music files from another external SSD. Then, restart the sync manager synchronization process, also exporting the new playlist containing the files from another external SSD. This restores the database. After that, you can delete the playlist created with the new SSD and eject the new SSD.