Realistic support for issues with database duplicates

I have been a Denon User (former Traktor) since Feb of 2024. The longer I use the software, the more oddities/issues I seem to identify.

First issue was duplicates in the collection pointing to the same physical file. The only solution I found was pay $20 a month for some software that would take care of this. I don’t think for that software should be necessary for the library to work properly.

I believe the duplicate entry issue comes from using traktor library at some point to bring in songs that already had cue points and grids (which, grids do not come in properly for certain songs, end up with tempo incorrectly, like 84.95 instead of 85. Dead perfect in traktor though) The path when the file is added from tractor includes “/Volumes/MacintoshHD/” for the path, and when the same song file is found by Engine DJ, which I presume looks at the music folders automatically, trims that off, so effectively have two entries in the collection for the same exact file.

Next, load the traktor entry into the deck, it will load the tractor cue points (single color blue); then add the Engine DJ entry second deck, it too will also load the traktor colors/cues. If you swap the order and add the Engine DJ entry first, followed by the Traktor entry, it will load the Engine DJ cue points/colors on both tracks. So, the short version is whichever library-entry you load into the deck first, the other will inherit those cues and colors. It’s obvious there are 2 database records for the same damn track!

(I don’t know how but this has to be where the next problem stems from)

The second issue is, after I noticed that my prime was freezing when I try to navigate playlists. Found by accident, I noticed that my complete library have been triplicated on my thumb drive. I only noticed this when I observed the disk usage on macOS did not match what engine DJ said it was transferring. I had to completely reformat the disk and sync everything again and then it was back to normal. If you run into issues with your hardware freezing, or slow, check the file structure on the thumb drive for files named “song_something (2).mp3”, and multiples counting up., if this keeps going and gets to around 50G, then the Prime go starts hanging when browsing the library on the USB drive.

I think the only way I can effectively report this would be to video capture my screen to show Engine DJ support… do I feel like trudging through months of support emails, and they won’t understand a damned thing I’m talking about and waste my time? … hell no…

Duplicate tracks : lots of ways of getting rid of them but really, in this day and age with ssd space being so cheap a few hundred duplicates isn’t really any sort of concern nowadays.

As for duplicate libraries , if you upgrade the firmware and software Engine on PCs/Mac a backup of the previous version of the database is written eg: if you upgrade from ver 3 to ver 4 - so those “duplicate” databases (not tracks) might be the safety backup copy of the library, in case you wanted/needed to roll back

The issue with this perspective is it that it ignores how duplicates make it difficult to manage cues, corrections to beat grids, loops, etc…

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There are multiple facets to the duplicates. In the first part of my post, it was the duplication of “Collection entries” (mutiple for the same file-on-disk) and in the second part, there was a bug which caused the explosion of files on my thumb drive which led to slow library load/browse and several hangs on my Denon Prime Go, and a need to rebuild everything (which was effectively painless, but shouldn’t happen in the first place.)

Since this post I’ve already noticed there are starting to be file duplicates on the thumb drive but still haven’t quite figured out why it occurs.

Are some of your dupes the safety backup files of the engine music database, which get created on each drive when the database is enhanced during major jumps in firmware/software versions?