SATA drive bay - supported sizes?

That would require a hardware update.

Yes of course. You know that, I know that … however… someone will probably still expect firmware to sort it :hugs:

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Can’t see why you want a 5gb I am preparing a 1tb and have 11k songs on it and haven’t used a quarter yet. That will give you a base track list for any event then requests on the night such as bride and groom selection you can throw on to flash drive.

Because many peoples’ music collections are larger than 1TB, and having to split up your collection across multiple drives is inconvenient. If you can have it all on one drive then why not?

Well like many others I’m switching to the P4 so that I don’t need to continue using a laptop. I don’t mind plugging in my portable drive to a USB port if that’s what it takes - that’s what I’m doing now with my Traktor rig and it’s fine. I was just hoping to be able to put this drive inside the P4 so as to eliminate one less thing from the setup.

Also does Engine work the same way as Traktor in the sense that you can have it not scan you entire music folder, but you can scan folders as needed on demand? In which case I would definitely not index the entire music drive, just the folders I want to as I’m working on DJ sets.

Hi @JWiLL,

we know the recommended drive for the Prime4 is 1TB SSD, but at the same time Denon recommends a maximum of 10K songs in the library for the SC5000, which is waaaay less that you can copy to 1TB drive:

From https://www.denondj.com/kb/2236/:

We recommend limiting the total track count to under 10,000 songs on a media source. Larger track counts may affect load/search/sort times. We recommend that you only add songs to a drive that you need for the show/night/tour.

Does this max 10K songs recommendation (and problem observed when been exceeded) apply only for the SC5000, or is it still valid for the Prime4?

If the Prime4 works better in that regard, do you think we can expect it to get eventually bettered in the SC5000?

Thank you.

PS: Related post explaining my problems when using more that 10k songs: Sluggish library browsing with huge library

1TB holds about 57,870 minutes of music in 24 bit 48Khz .wav format. That’s about 10,000-11,500 songs.

That’s in WAV though and frankly if you’re playing WAV or FLAC at gigs then that’s a little dumb as I guarantee no one in the audience will be able to tell the difference between that and a high quality MP3 file (320kpbs for example).

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Correct and mostly irrelevant, as most people don’t store their music in that format.

Until you play on PK and Function One. Trust me, you do hear the difference.

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Having field tested this premise with sound engineers and DJs in both professional clubs and outdoor high end PA’s, I have to side with those that claim nobody in the audience will hear the difference between lossless audio and 320kbps MP3, provided the latter is truly encoded directly from a lossless original, in full stereo (not joint) and at the highest quality settings.

That said, going for FLAC (which still provides a pretty hefty compression rate) gives you lossless audio and the ability to store quite a collection on a portable device.

I do believe too much emphasis is being placed these days on being able to carry the music of the world with you on disks, sticks and what have you, on the off-chance it will be requested.

An old DJ creed back in the day that maybe holds true even more today, is that you should know any track you (might) play in a set intimately. Back in the vinyl days, the tracks I had in my collection, I knew what intro and outro they had, where the breaks were and mostly the full lyrics by heart.

The thing is, the most important DJ factor, “Knowing what to play next”, is something that works in your head. And your head will pick based on the information it has. The best gigs I played in my life, were like on autopilot, every track I played in my head gave me 3,4 or 5 options for the next one. And depending on the way the crowd went I could easily keep leading them. And this is when I had the choice of less than 1.000 tracks.

I sympathize with large collections for mobile DJs. We do get requests and it’s fun to be able to play them, especially if they fit in your gig. But even with 40k+ tracks I get requests that I don’t have. Sure you can download and/or stream a track on the fly. But that would break another cardinal DJ rule, imho, the one that says "don’t play tracks you haven’t listened to or that come from unknown sources - like a guests memory-stick or phone, or CDs in days gone by).

My advice to young DJs that I coach is now to have a true core collection that you know inside out, refresh but only with tracks that are so good that you are willing to toss a lesser track from your collection (preventing your tight core collection to grow out of control in a few years again).

Just and old DJ-hand talking and sharing his 3 cents as usual.

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I have played on (and setup and tuned - I sometimes do freelance work as a lighting and sound engineer outside of my normal day job) several Funkion One systems, never really liked them though, they’re usually too harsh for my taste in the highs - absolute pain to tame properly. Personally I prefer Void Acoustic systems but that’s very much down to personal preference.

Anyway that’s beside the point, it is highly unlikely that anyone in the audience would be a full on audiophile (or even if there are any, they are probably drinking so their opinion doesn’t matter :slight_smile: ). There have also been blind tests between high quality MP3 files and FLAC/WAV with audiophiles not able to tell the difference.

Some people have gone as far as analysing the information contained in a 320kbps MP3 file and all the information lost happens above 20khz where human ears cannot hear anyway.

Actually, you will feel the difference too. Mp3 is only audible spectrum right. Lossless makes your skin tingle.

I agree and think however that it’s more than fun. I think it’s where practice, skill and experience of judging audience reactions really comes into its own. Getting a track that you’ve not played for ages, mixed into whatever tunes you’re already playing, even when there’s no analysis, no confirmed beatgrid, no auto-setting of 8 key parts of the track, no harmonic keys prompted or auto-tuned etc… and they still kept dancing!

That assumes the recording and mixing engineers have kept absolutely everything in the recording, which I know for a fact doesn’t happen.

Often engineers will dump (or roll off) everything out of the audible spectrum.

True that. Why is that anyway? Thats what mp3 is for isnt it?

maybe an hardware update is implemented faster then a firmware update…(being cynical)

Real DJ’s don’t take requests :wink: Kidding kidding… but in all seriousness, requests are not a thing in my world (clubs / underground / outdoor parties) so for me personally it’s not about having every possible song available for a crowd’s demands, but having my entire collection - curated for years in FLAC format, with maniacal organization and tagging - available to me for my own enjoyment whenever I want. Not managing multiple thumb drives, but having a single source of truth for all music in my possession.

This is the future with DJing btw… having access to everything you own, with integration between your hardware device, software like Traktor or Rekordbox, and online storage for real time streaming to your device or full downloading of files for offline playback (out at a festival with no internet, for example). Trust me… having access to everything you own with advanced searching and streaming ability will not only become a growing demand but will become the norm for DJs and performers period.

I agree with you here. I carry both on me. I have a 1TB SSD that has almost the entirety of my digital collection along with two mirrored USBs for the gig. Cant count the amount of times where I thought of a tune that fit the moment perfectly, and voila it was on my ssd.

So large library’s at ever gig IS the way forward, is what we’re reading more and more people ask for. It’s less and less common for the elite style of a festival or club DJ to export 20 songs to a little usb flash drive and say stuff the audience, these 20 tracks are what they’re going to hear tonight whether they want it, or not.

Maybe the solution is to have a utility option of “make my search look at all my drives on all the USB ports and deliver the results as one list as if all the drives were one drive”

This would save the DJ running the same search manually against however many drives his collection spans across eg: 3 x 1TB drives plugged in