Red Tracks on SD card or USB after using Sync Manager

Engine DJ Hardware Standalone Controllers
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I have faced a problem when using SD card or USB plugged into Denon Prime GO. Some of the tracks in Denon Prime Go showed up RED and when I tried to load them into decks, warning message appeared saying “File unavailable”.

It took me 3 days and many tries, including reinstallation and different library updates. I finally found a solution to this problem and I think it is a subject that should be updated in the next release of Engine OS, ASAP! Let me describe everything below:

I have used sync manager to transfer all my playlists from Engine collection to SD card and USB. In Engine DJ desktop app all my tracks were white and playable - everything seemed fine, even hot cues from Serato were there. However, on an SD card and USB some of the tracks were RED.

The problem is that Denon Prime Go does not read special characters/letters. I’m Polish and in our language we have letters like “ą” “ę” “ć” “ł” etc. so any song that contained any of these characters in its filename or metadata became “unavailable” to play. I also found that some of afro-house songs used letters like “É” and it also became unavailable. It is a pity because having a big music collection that contain these special characters/ letters requires to removed them MANUALLY!!! There is no automated way that will remove these for you…

So PLEASE, dear Denon Support, consider having a look at this issue. It is something that for sure affects all eastern european languages as well as many others that uses special letters and accent letters.

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You can do this changes automatically with mp3tag. I have done this with this program to my complete lib. But that should not been the case. If the OS and the preparing software could read international letter this should never happend. This has to be fixed very soon. Also the words will lost its meaning, when you replace é with e. The problem are the code pages. Every country with special letter in their language have it´s own codepage to translate (Old 4Bit/8Bit problem from the past) so it is not easy to to translate this to the software. If you take a look at wikipedia about the UTF and ISO standards, you see the mess :wink: - It´s not easy to translate this special letters to the computer :slight_smile: I think with ISO 8859-15 they could manage many (but not all languages).

here is a good article about that in english:

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Hi DJDark, thanks for reply. It’s an interesting topic. I agree - I think this should be fixed in the update as soon as possible. I was able to manually change these international letters because I didn’t have thousands of songs affected but otherwise I can’t imagine… It’s also sad that the desktop app reads the files but the unit itself doesn’t.

I use mp3tag. It’s an amazing piece of software. Do you know what would be the best way of automatically changing these special letters for multiple songs? If you have any workflow for this figured out I’d much appreciate your advice.

The other problem with these changes is that after “fixing” metadata in files itself, they are becoming lost in itunes and serato library. I guess in other programs they will become lost too. Sure, they can be imported again or relocated (which consumes more time) but they will not appear on the playlist that they been previously added to.

Do you know what is the best way to notify Denon about this? Is there a space for creating tickets/requests for upcoming updates?

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Sit back and wait buddy, as developers are slow to solve really big problems. We are waiting for support for lost files and so far, not even a shadow!

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To automatically change this on a lot of tracks, you have to write an “action batch”. There you tell mp3tag which letters you want to exchange with other. It´s like search and replace. when you then select multiple files, it will do that batch to all selected files. but you need to enter all letters to exchange by yourself. I have done it with all german special letters and some of the á é ú ó s. it works very well. So when I get new tracks, at first batch tag & rename them. then I start engine to import.

Mp3tag
Mp3tag1240×608 113 KB

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@DJDark mp3tag might be usefull software, and I appreciate the suggestion, but I should not be required to cripple MP3 tags to get them synchronized. If there is a special character in a tag, it has its meaning. If any software requires this to be changed, or changes this by accident, then this is a bug.

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Thats true. It was a temporary fix for me.

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I asked Denon support about this question:

"I would like to know if devices that use OS Engine recognize special characters in songs like “ç, ã, â, õ, ö” both in Filename and ID3 Tag, because I read some reports from people who are having difficulties in this regard like songs that are not working on the device, but work perfectly on the Engine Desktop.

I will be migrating from Serato DJ Mac to Engine Desktop Windows. I have many songs that have special characters and they need to work and be recognized in Engine OS and your devices."

Engine Support answer:

"Hi Rodrigo,

Thank you for reaching out to us! I appreciate the opportunity to assist you! ​ The short answer is yes, you can use the characters you specified in your tracks. ​ The type of character you can use is based on the format of the drive, which would be FAT32 or ExFAT for your removable drive. Therefore, you can use any unicode 2 byte character. Here is a list of characters that would be acceptable: ​

​ If you do have difficulties with a specific song or file, I would recommend copying the character from that page and replacing it in the filename. Not all software’s will use 2-byte characters when formatting and replacing the character by copying the one from that page would resolve those issues.

Please feel free to reach back out if you have any other issues or questions.

Best Regards,

Sebastian Zapata

Technical Support & Return Authorizations"

So, according to them, it’s supposed to work.

First, you need to check if your files have characters that are in the ASCII UTF-8 table. If so, you will need to check if there are characters in these files that are, shall we say, special and do not correspond to traditional characters. This happens a lot in music downloaded from YouTube and/or various download sites.

I find it unlikely that the Engine OS in full 2022 does not accept special characters used in languages such as German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, etc. It wouldn’t be viable.

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I don’t particularly use this program for editing ID3 fields. But if you use it, pay attention to this configuration:

Captura de tela 2022-07-11 185342

Leave the UTF-8 option checked which is compatible with EDJ. Do not use UTF-16! As you said you migrated from iTunes, it is likely that the table is wrong.

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That is a real good hint !!! In my case - the default setting of mp3tag was UTF-16. Very good!!! I resetted it to UTF-8 now! Thanks

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Hi all,

even though this topic is a few months old, I just stumbled upon the same problem. I got the SC Live 4 a week ago and also had the red track issue. I was an serato user and this is my first experience with the engine prime system. In order to populate my engine prime library, I used the sync function to import crates from my serato library to engine prime. Afterwards, I synced the engine prime library to my SD card and here’s where the red track issue occurs. After hours of researching, I tried to import a track not from serato to my engine prime library but from the file system directly. And here, the issue was solved, I could play the song just fine?! It was exactly the same file.

What I did now was looking for the differences. I checked the id3 tags and the file names and all seemed to be the same. What I found out though is, they were not. On your target sd card or usb stick is a folder called Engine Library/Database2 in which the database is stored for the engine prime system to work. The most important file is m.db in which the metadata to the tracks are stored like cue points, album art, but also the very important columns path and file. When I compared the two records my two similar tracks, they path and file seemed almost completely similar. They looked like this:

Schüttel deinen Speck.mp3

Schüttel deinen Speck (2).mp3

The file and path have to be unique, that’s why Engine appended a (2) for the second track. However, I analyzed the bytes of the path names and they were different for the ü. Using python and its str.encode() method, the output was the following:

b’Schu\xcc\x88ttel deinen Speck.mp3’

b’Sch\xc3\xbcttel deinen Speck.mp3’

The upper ü is represented by a normal u, following the utf8 character cc88 while the lower ü is represented by a “single character” c3bc. It appears that Engine Prime can only handle the single char representations.

What solved my problem was just updating that database entry with the single char representation of the character, not the “appended” one. Fortunately, I did not even have to change filenames which would have been a complete mess, also to ensure that the serato library still keeps functioning.

I am going to write a small python application which processes the database and replaces the not-working characters with their working replacements. However, I just tested this for the ü problematic. It is likely it will also solve the problematic for characters like ä ö è ê but maybe not for all cases.

Btw: Unfortunately, I cannot upload images since I just registered to publish this. It would have made it much clearer.

@Admin: Please let me upload images :wink: @Devs: Maybe you can fix this issue also in Engine Prime directly.

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1 - Engine Prime no longer exists it has been replaced by Engine Dj so it makes sense that you use EDJ for library building in dedicated media for your SC Live 4.

2 - Special character problems are mostly present in Windows! So I think you are using a PC.

For my part, I do not encounter this kind of problem with my Mac and the same with the Windows 10 Bootcamp partition.

the idtags do use UTF-8 and the ISO 8859-1 text encoding for the id3v23.

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  1. Sorry, not familiar with all the terminology. I meant Engine DJ.
  2. No, I’m using a Mac M1 from 2020.

Did you also move your serato library to engine dj? Maybe the import process is wrong. For my part, the first tests using my custom script to replace some bytes in the filename/path were successful.

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It’s even weirder if you’re using a Mac! I never had this kind of problem, except put in the Windows partition because there were symbols : /° @ # '" ; % , and an extra space at the end of the folder name.

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Capture d’écran 2022-12-07 à 22.48.331440×900 127 KB

What do you use for tag software?

For my part in my Win10 partition, I use Tagscanner and from time to time MP3Tag (exists for mac, but paying), and in my Mac I use Jaikoz and also occasionally Mp3Tag.

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I used to tag my tracks using Serato. However, the id3tags are not the problem at all. Its only the filename which caused problems and only, when I imported songs from serato.

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Is the idtag of your MP3 files really id3v23??? Same for me I use Serato since their beginning with ScratchLive, Itch, SDJ and SDJ Pro.

Since the arrival of Engine Dj and not Engine Prime I no longer use Serato Dj Pro, because Engine Dj is very intuitive for importing files that already exist in our PCs/Macs, a simple drag / drop and everything imported even including subfolders.

If the Artist, Title tags are written correctly, the file name must be tagged identically!

I had fun writing a rotten tg on an audio file with the maximum number of special characters and it worked well! Even my Prime 4 read the file.

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Can you try this with an ALAC/m4a? None of the tagging softwares I am aware of allows to set the ID3 version of an ALAC file, the only option some have is to set UTF-8/16.

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Where is this script? I’m having the same issues and can’t figure it out.

EDIT: I figured out my issue; the offending tracks were nested in folders that had a space at the end of the folder name. That’s it. Removed the space(s), and everything is back to normal. Sad that a stupid thing like this could cause this in hardware running Engine (SC5000 and Mixstream Pro tested). Not the case with Rekordbox.