I’ve had my SC6000s since 2020 hard to believe now. At first it seemed my Rekordbox DJ guests would insert their sticks and most would import and work fine like maybe 90%.
Over time it got worse and worse to now a definite majority of sticks do not import successfully. And I’m talking a wide variety of sticks, large, small, inexpensive, high-end, and external drives too. Imports often hang about halfway through and never finish, or they claim to finish and then have no playlists, or just be so excruciatingly slow that we cancel to get the sesh going.
This happens on both players, which are obviously independent of each other, and for so so so many guest DJs, who fly in from around the country so their libraries reflect quite a diversity from smaller collections to large collections with many playlists, I’m sure varying versions of Rekordbox.
This is very frustrating and embarrassing.
So first, is this a common thing with Engine hardware now? And second, what can I tell people ahead of time with regards to prepping their sticks, aside from downloading and installing Engine Desktop and recreating their library for a platform they’re never going to use but just once?
Pretty disappointing considering this is promoted as a major feature of the players.
Haven’t Alphatheta changed their whole database recently? I believe that might be the source of your issues. Id say to them to download Engine and do some analysis, or chuck some none analysed tracks on a flash drive.
They have recently introduced a new database format which for the time being only works on the Opus Quad controller. This database will probably not be read or recognized by Engine OS at all.
All existing Pioneer hardware including CDJs continue to use the original format that Engine OS can read and this format hasn’t changed in like 10 years because it needs to be backwards compatible with a huge variety of installed club hardware.
Exporting a USB in the latest version of Rekordbox puts both old and new databases next to each other in the USB stick, so this does not explain the issue. It’s not different than Engine OS putting its database on the same USB next to a Rekordbox one, which is what happens currently.
So from my experience Engine OS is getting worse and worse at reading an essentially unchanging database format.
I know I can do this. This is pretty inconvenient and embarrassing. I would prefer the feature Denon promotes on this hardware to work.
Someone with more knowledge than me will jump in with concrete answers, but I believe they are putting changes into their whole infrastructure that is preventing other companies from tapping into their DB data.
Why would Engine be getting worse? I cant imagine they are changing anything in that part of the software that will impact it that much.
I’ll get my Prime 2 out later this week and run some tests with my RB USB’s to see what happens, then report back.
not sure if this will solve your issue. I run into similar situations where older usb pendrives take forever to load or go through the playlists.
What I find works a loooot better is simply to instead of doing it on the player, just go to my computer, open engine and just connect the usb drive. Unlike Rekordbox it doesn’t need to be linked to your account so it’ll just scan the tracks and add the metadata. It takes a couple of minutes to run a 32gb usb drive and you just get to see the marveled faces of people enjoying their playlists / cuepoints / etc without any hassle.
Also, on the ocasion of grid misalignment or bpm not correct, just show them they can actually edit it on the fly on the player and you’ll be sure to get a “I didn’t know you could do that”