Hi, I’m just getting off the ground with a new SC6000 - LC6000 combo and not having a very positive experience so far. Setting up an Engine library was a… buggy process but I got there in the end. All the documentation says the SC is “compatible with Serato DJ Pro”, but is it by itself? Or do I need a Serato-compatible digital mixer as well? The setup I’m trying to configure is: laptop w/ Serato, Denon media players in computer mode, and an analogue mixer. But the SC6000 just displays a screen saying “please connect Serato DJ hardware”. I thought the SC6000 WAS the hardware that enabled Serato? I hope it is, because that’s the reason I bought it. First impressions of Engine DJ are that it’s not going to be for me and more trouble than it’s worth to migrate from Serato (nothing in terms of cues and beatgrids are carried over), so I want to continue using Serato.
It’s not. You need a SDJ certified audio interface, either external or a mixer with a integrated one.
Not sure why you thought otherwise since this is how SDJ works since…forever.
This link will help a lot:
You can sync your Serato library into Engine by using the Engine Desktop software and its Serato integration feature, there are guides on Youtube for this.
As others have said, the SC-6000 isnt going to activate Serato in the way you think it is, its a media player that will act as a midi controller for the deck you want to control. In order for Serato to play music through an audio source it needs to be a Serato certified mixer/controller.
Also did you not think to scope all this out before spending £1500 on gear?
Thanks for your responses. I was actually intending on using Engine OS and mixing through my analogue mixer but I quickly realised Engine OS probably doesn’t suit my approach to DJing as well as having a laptop interface. It’s probably good for performances and routines where a DJ has a carefully curated collection. But I have a huge collection (tens of thousands of tracks) and prefer to experiment, and make adjustments to beat grids (if necessary) as I am cueing up. That’s relatively easily and painlessly done on the controller I have, with dedicated grid editing hardware buttons, but it’s a cumbersome process on the SC6000, opening the grid editor with the touch screen. And the Engine desktop software doesn’t respond to tap-clicks from the Wacom stylus I use with my computer which is really annoying (I can only use a mouse, which I find uncomfortable for repetitive and precise tasks). The SC6000’s line output is really low and the analogue mixer that I want to use it with doesn’t have channel gains. It’s a high-end mixer (Varia Instruments RDM20) but it’s simple and elementary with no bells or whistles. That was part of the appeal. You simply turn up the rotary pot on the channel you’re playing and that’s it. Each channel goes to “10” and unity gain is at “7”. It’s fantastic with vinyl. Through the phono inputs, most records peak at 0db at about “5”, so there is massive headroom, but the SC6000 running into the line inputs peaks as low as -5db when turned up 100% to 10. I guess I just needed to get my hands on the SC6000 to figure this stuff out. I’ll play around with it some more and see if I warm up to it but I think I’ll probably flog it off and take a small loss on it and stick with using a controller for digital DJing and a separate analogue setup
You could try and pick up a used SL box and run it on an earlier version of Serato? thats how mine is set up at home. You will need a computer with an intel chip though and not one of the new M chip macbooks.
This is my setup for digital and analogue DJing, i use splitter cables to redirect the analogue signal into the phono input on my mixer, whilst also feeding into the sound card.
Edit: and your comment about lack of trim level is why im glad i picked up the Radius, i know its not ‘Rotary purist’ to have trim but its possibly the most useful knob on a DJ mixer.
I do still have a Rane SL4 box but it is obsolete to me because I don’t have a computer which supports it anymore. My older Macbook which worked with the SL4 came to the end of its life recently and I have an M2 now. I’m still peeved about that SL4 support being discontinued, to tell you the truth!
Nice setup by the way. That’s the goal - a unified analogue-digital setup. Since the Rane SL4 became obsolete, I couldn’t use digital sources with my analogue setup. I do have a controller (which I was planning on selling after I got the SC6000 player) and I mostly just used that and neglected the turntables and alalogue mixer that I spent a lot of money on
Haha i rant about it at every given opportunity, i have a £2000 M1 Macbook Pro sat in my house that is essentially useless for DJing on my setup. Luckily its fantastic for photo and video editing so i use it for that… but man Serato have annoyed the hell out of me.
Ive picked up a Traktor sound card recently and the plan is to move over to that if i ever need to. I just need LC-6000 support, or to swap it out for a media player of some description, 3 deck mixing is a must.
Have you considered buying an old Mac or PC on eBay
Install MacOS 10.9 or Windows 8
Install Serato Scratch Live 2.5 and Serato DJ 1.9
DJ Pro works up to version 2.5.5 i think (at least i think thats what im running), and it supports pretty much all existing devices outside of the last few.
My only issue is W8.1 is now completely unsupported so poses a security risk, Catalina is supported for now but one day Apple will end that too and then we will be stuck.
Ironically inMusic removed support for their own sound cards so we can’t update our macs past Catalina, but then the new version of Engine Desktop requires Ventura due to those file issues that were seen in the previous version.
I dare say im an ultra minority with my use case but im essentially caught up between 2 situations caused by the same company.
I use Apple Music (iTunes) to organise my very large library, (which I’m always adding to). I’ve used it for a long time and have made over 200 smart playlists for categories like record labels etc. That’s how I keep a handle on such a large library. I do all my organising in Apple Music and then it’s all just there ready to go in Serato. I don’t need to organise it twice. When I tried to import my Apple Music library to Engine DJ it brought in the Apple playlists but they’re all empty shells. I had to manually drag the files from each Apple playlist into each Engine version of the playlist, so they are not even live-updating, which is a problem for my approach to keeping my library organised for DJing purposes.
Apple Music isn’t perfect but I like it for what it does well. I use it to edit metadata, play albums on my living room hifi when I am not DJing, and to sync playlists onto my phone. But the library is not backwards-compatible with older operating systems. Once you update your Apple OS (I’m now on Monterey) and start using your Music library, the “.musiclibrary” catalogue file is updated and you can’t reopen it on an older version of MacOS. The files are there of course, but you’d have to duplicate your music hard drive and create a brand-new older version of the library and you’d lose all your playlists, ratings, date-added etc. My library is so large now that all that information is like a map through the forest to me.
So using an older MacOS and reorganising and maintaining a second library is no better as a solution than going all-in and reorganising a second library in Engine OS. I don’t want to have to pick through tens of thousands of tracks and try to decide what to load onto Engine OS or a second Apple Music library and what not to, it’s an impossible task. I’m used to having it all available and making those choices track by track as I’m DJing. And I don’t really want to be stuck indefinitely on older versions of Serato or whatever other software I’m using.
From what I gather, Apple has scrapped iTunes and since then all integration of those playlists into DJ software has been screwed.
I’m not here to tell others how to do their organising, but I’ve never trusted Apple in that respect so I’ve always organised music myself, removing tracks from folders and creating my own genre driven folders.
It’s a tough pill to swallow but relying on someone like Apple (who don’t give two hoots about DJs) to organise your library was always a hide into nothing.
It is completely up to the DJ Software how good / bad Apple Music is supported. Apple is providing API’s that other software can use to get information from Apple Music. (I would like to see an documented API to access Engine DJ data as well 
)
I agree that current functionality is only elementary but for all supported sources Rekordbox, Serato, Traktor, Apple Music it is more or less the same.
But we have the change to open feature requests for what we would like to see improved and if there is enough interest from the community there it the chance that it will make it in the final product. As you may know Denon DJ is updating Engine constantly with useful improvements and that is a great thing.
For the purpose of this discussion I will refer to Apple Music as iTunes 
what about regular iTunes playlist? Do they import to EngineDJ?
Engine DJ does not import Serato smart crates either. I have loads of Smartcrates as well. There are 5 or 6 smart crates that I use a lot so I nested them with a manual copy…which I update in Serato.
If you select a dedicated iTunes playlist in Engine DJ to import, the playlist will be created in the Engine DJ Library.
The Denon DJ Ds1 is still supported by Serato by the way
How do you like the LC6000?
I’ve been playing around with it and am getting used to it more. I am still in a long process of rebuilding my (massive) library because the approach I took to library management with Serato just doesn’t fit well with this system. The SC6000 isn’t usable with the mixer I wanted to use it with (Varia Instruments RDM20) because that mixer has no trims/gains, and the line level signal is way lower than what the phono signal comes through at. So that’s entirely to do with the mixer and just something I didn’t understand until the day I connected the SC6000 to it. I do however also have an Allen & Heath Xone:32 so I am using that instead. There’s things I like about this setup, and things I miss about using a controller. But I am having some fun and staying interested in DJing, so can’t complain.
I’m thinking to add 2x LC 6k to my setup. As there is a great deal but an SC and get an LC free so the plan is to buy 2 get two flog two off.