Which seems far more likely now to be a corrupt audio file… or rather, at least, a music file which isn’t strictly following guidelines on its header data. Some programs and devices, especially desktop and laptop computers, are far more forgiving of header deviations.
For example, I had some files which had massive album art associated with them, far larger specs than MP3 art is supposed to have; almost a meg, just for a colour picture. My desktop computer opened up the file, played the music and showed the album art, but my phone, my in car head unit player and my primes wouldn’t play the same file.
It’s worth finding the suspect files and stripping off all the MP3 tags and artwork and reapplying those tags and art
Totally agree with the stripping of tags. I’ve reduced all of my collection to a nice selected few data fields and removed things like ape and old ID3 info. Some files have multiple album art and programs like Mp3tag are great for removing crap from music files. It’s paid for on Mac but free on Windows.
If you have a backup of the problem files, then run them through one of the mp3 file repairers above (don’t fix an original before forwarding it onto Denon DJ). These apps really do fix almost all of the issues with mp3 files and can do batches so you can just drop a folder in and watch them get fixed all in one go. You shouldn’t even have to import them into Engine again as they make a copy, repair then delete the old file so Engine should still see them as the original.
One of the best pieces of info I read a few year back was the Native Instruments blog on it all. I’ll find it…
I only ever had one and only one crash with Traktor when I used it. I never really used Traktor but I purchased an S8 to play around with at home but one day decided to give it a go in a local club. I played a track that I’d played in Serato DJ a billion times (almost) and Traktor just dumped me onto my desktop halfway though playing it in the club. I never took the S8 out again and it stayed at home.
I found the above article and the Mac repairer fixed the file in question and reported that there was garbage in the header. It was a purchased track too.
In an ideal world, EP should be detecting these tracks and alerting the user.
Serato DJ gives an icon and tells you whats wrong with the track.
And if by some chance a corrupt track still ends up on a USB stick, Engine OS should prevent play or grey it out so the party doesn’t stop due to a hardware crash. It may also take it further by sequestering it into a autogenerated “corrupt and missing file” folder.
Non-english characters should not cause an issue in this age and time. They work fine in other softwares and should in EP and EOS (another ideal scenario).
Also from a software point of view, it’s incredibly annoying and time-consuming adding localisations, many, many companies rely just on standard accepted English characters and only add support for additional ones if absolutely necessary.
Depends on encoding amongst other things. For some localisations, you have to switch the encoding, or sometimes even the font to get them to show up. Supporting special chars is a pain in the ass.
Just yesterday I was dealing with an issue where the British pound symbol “£” would not show on a PDF generated using the wkhtmltopdf program on the test server, yet worked fine on my local machine. Turns out spawning a new system process was overwriting the utf-8 encoding we’d specified in the html version of the PDF file. Took 3 devs 6 hours to figure this one out, and we still don’t know why it worked locally but not on the server (my current theory is it was a threading issue where encoding context wasn’t preserved on different threads)!
This may be true but there are a hell of a lot of tunes that have them, therefore Denon should make the effort to fix this annoying problem. I was the one mentioned above who had the issue with a Beatport download. Still unable to find a solution to change the information to standard characters as they seem to be imbedded in the file. Even when I change the characters, the same problem occurs. So, money wasted.
Any freeware id3 tag editor should do it. I don’t have a specific recommendation so just Google “id3 tag editor” and there should be plenty of options.
Solution: So I’ve found for my case the issues weren’t anything to do with MP3 ID3 data or album art after venturing down that route. The issue for me has been with the Engine Prime Mac Softwares built in import function. For some reason when importing a trial playlist of 100 tracks almost every time I would have about 10 tracks that despite the base MP3 working fine in other DJ software and file folder (finder) will just bug out and glitch the software completely resulting in a full force quit of the software and restart.
If I however utilise drag and drop of playlists rather than using the built in import playlist feature I have no errors whatsoever. I tested a 500 track playlist without a single issue in either engine prime or on the SC6000. I’ve sent the crash reports for both the players and the software to denon with this explanation so hopefully they’ll get to work solving this.
I’ve reimported my entire music library again now and haven’t had any issues thus far so hopefully the problems solved for myself. I’m going to go through my entire collection though testing all the tracks just for peace of mind for going back to gigs and any further internal corruptions I come across I’ll report to denon.
Just wanted to also say a huge thanks to everyone on this thread. As a complete newbie to Denon and library transfers there’s been some very helpful suggestions all of which have helped me get to this point I believe of mitigating the issue.
Fantastic that you seem to have found the source of the problem.
Hopefully Denon DJ will be able to work out what is going on from this and make adjustments in the code. It seems it could be a strange quirk that you’ve found and the testing you’ve done proved how hard you worked to sort it. Nice!
That depends on the locality 
