i’ve attempted so many things at this point it’s so frustrating. I’m not sure What’s going on with this Engine dj collection and drive to hardware thing I don’t even know what to call it. i’ve done so many things to try and fix this.
Essentially I had tracks that were red and unplayable in the hardware but white when connected to my Laptop AND PLAYABLE. I’ve successfully fixed some tracks in the midst of my attempts in the span of 7 months… and they weren’t bothersome since i fixed them (empty spaces in the title) but there were other tracks that were still giving me issues. There were no accents in the titles of the track or the artist name. I’ve done so much research and didn’t find anything that fully helped which is why I’m now making this post. I’ve Removed the tracks from my collection, that didn’t work. I relocated them.. that didn’t work. I removed them from the drive, that didn’t work. I deleted my database….. that didn’t work? I ended up realizing there were spaces in the file names of these red tracks and I was able to successfully make these specific tracks work and play in my hardware but now they keep duplicating after everytime I clean it up and plug it back in the hardware (Denon Sc Live 4), and are red still while having playable duplicates too. How can I clean this up?
This was the most bothersome issue. I would spend time fixing the tracks in engine dj to then see them again when I plugged it into the hardware. Any help is greatly appreciated..
Engine OS doesn’t even accept all ASCII characters in filenames, I have filenames with a question mark which load perfectly fine in Engine DJ, but show as red tracks on Engine OS. Seems silly that there is a difference between what is accepted on desktop and the hardware.
Your desktop file system is almost certainly different than the Engine OS acceptable file systems, exFAT and FAT32. Look up the legal characters for those.
the space character was definitely the issue as since I fixed it, I haven’t had issues with said files. I actually remember this being an issue before in my transition and caught myself in the same situation with the current focus of this topic. Engine OS just keeps duplicating the files from what it seems like the old directory set for them for when the files weren’t working at all on the hardware. Basically the files are now all good - The issue is the fact that engine OS keeps reviving these “files” into my collection when I plug my SSD in (No audio is found so technically no file)
@kkkranium When you plug in a USB, Engine DJ will load those files into the Engine Library co-mingled with the Engine library files on your computer. The “DRIVES” tab at the bottom left will let you view what’s on what.
Did you do a fresh sync to the USB after cleaning up the desktop library? If not, I’d suggest backing up and deleting the /Engine Library/ folder on the USB and doing a new sync.
As for file naming, you can search for “FAT32 allowed characters in file names”. But, it’s generally best to stick to A-Z, a-z, 0-9, -_ in file names. Replace space with _ or -. I will admit, I use $() and # at times, as they are allowed and I haven’t had problems with them.
Definitely not allowed: <>:"/|?* ASCII NUL
You’re right, but it’s been my habit for decades. I’m just going by some recommendations I’ve read. I do use some characters that are frowned upon, such as parentheses.
In fact, if you do a search one of the AI results is
“ You shouldn’t have spaces in file names because they can cause errors with certain software, scripts, and command-line interfaces, which interpret spaces as a separator between words. Spaces can also create issues in web URLs and make file names harder to process consistently across different systems. It’s best practice to replace spaces with a hyphen (-) or an underscore (_).”
Meh. The scripts that can’t handle non-alpha numeric characters are just poorly coded. Dealing with “white space” characters (\n \r \s \t) is just the cost of processing any text really.
