Standalone USB Drives

General Area
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Hey, I’ve asked a few of my more experienced friends and none of them know of a path to a solution, so I wanted to ask here and make sure I’m not missing a way to accomplish my goal.

Often times I am provided a USB with a label’s entire discography. On that USB are usually some sort of lossless file format (ie: .wav, .aiff, .flac) normally spread across some sort of directory structure.

I want to plug in such a USB to my computer, open Engine DJ Desktop, and have Engine DJ Desktop analyze each file on the drive, create a library for the files on the drive, and place the library on the drive while keeping all the files in-place. None of the files or library information would be imported into the computer Engine DJ Desktop Collection, and would be only contained to the USB drive.

What is important about this step is that now when I plug in the USB to my Prime 4+, I am able to select it as a source and see Key/BPM information, as well as be able to search on those tracks. I understand that if these are untag’d files, the search would be more limited, but I should be able to search for “Banana” and find any tracks with the text “Banana” within the filename, and I should see those tracks’ Key and BPM information.

Looking at it another way, if I were to plug in a USB with such files into my Prime 4+, when I manually load the first file, it is analyzed and a library is created on the USB. As I manually load more files, these files are analyzed and added to the library. The end result is exactly what I want, but analyzing on the Prime 4+ is great if needed, but a bit slow and would be better done on a computer. In additional to the slower analysis, this must be done manually for each track, which is painstaking and annoying. If I want a USB with more than 20 or so tracks, this is impractical. Sending all the files to be played out in Zone 2 is not a solution as some of these USBs have a week’s worth of audio within them.

While having a main Collection/library and working from that is great for most scenarios, I find it kinda weird that a seemingly basic functionality to scan a USB drive and add a library to it doesn’t exist, especially since both Rekordbox and Engine DJ OS treat every single USB I plug in as a media drive, as if there are no other reasons to plug in a USB to your computer.

If this functionality is available within Rekordbox, I’d be very glad to hear how that solution works, as I would be able to take that Rekordbox USB, plug it into the Prime 4+ and do a one-time conversion from Rekordbox to Engine library. 99% of the time I will never update or touch these USBs, so I’d only have to do this process a single time per USB.

The only way I know how to accomplish this goal is to painstakingly manually load each track. An idea I have is to spin up a VM and install Engine DJ Desktop on it, analyze the tracks, and then export to the USB drive, but I have a suspicion that this will result in all of the tracks being duplicated on the drive which is not an option for many of these drives which are already filled to over half of their total capacity.

Another practical use is, while some devices can convert a Rekordbox playlist to Engine, not all devices have this capability. If my friend comes over with their Rekordbox USB, and I want to show off and convince them how great Denon is, I want to be able to plug in their USB to my computer, analyze all the tracks on the drive, create a library on the drive, and be able to plug in that drive to be used by Denon hardware. All without duplicating the files on the USB, or impacting my main/computer Engine Collection/library.

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Your assumptions are incorrect. Engine uses its database for all searches. So when you search for the term banana, the API calls the database, executes a search and returns the results. In fact Engine, Serato and Rekordbox all work the same way. The only exception is Virtual DJ.

Additionally all metadata, harvested from the analysis is stored in the database.

If you are resident, you could connect the USB drive to your laptop and analyze the data there and then use the remote library feature to keep them off of your working laptop or the Prime 4.

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instead of doing the whole VM dance, you could simply:

  • Rename Engine Library/ in your computer’s OS storage device to something like Engine Library.old/ and then do your analyze process. From that, quit Engine, delete the newly minted Engine Library/ and rename Engine Library.old/ back to Engine Library/
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Plug the drive to laptop

Start Engine DJ

Click on the drive panel

Add the tracks to collection

Analyse

Eject the drive

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Thank you so much! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for, and is wonderful functionality. I feel a little silly not finding this path myself, but super glad you responded to this post because this is incredible and perfect.

Now I can process these USBs with thousands of tracks and I don’t have to do it manually like many people were under the impression must be done.

Now if my friend comes over with a Rekordbox drive, we can convert it to Engine very quickly, and gives us an option other than having the Prime 4+ do the conversion itself (Not everybody has a Prime 4+ so this will be very useful to others).

Edit: It does add these to my main Collection, but I’ll be able to remove those once the analysis is complete and will be easy cleanup.

Edit2: Oh, the behavior is that when the drive is removed, these new entries drop from the main Collection and are no longer visible. Nice.

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Yes. The Collection is the view where all found databases on the computer are shown; local and removable drives. If you want to see the Engine content of one drive, select the corresponding drive first.

RekordBox flashdrives are only converted to Engine when using a Engine OS device. @mufasa Engine Desktop can only import or am I wrong?

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Yeah, that’s what I was suggesting.

If you have a compatible Engine OS device, you can do a conversion from Rekordbox to Engine library. I’m not familiar enough with all of the available devices to know which support this and which do not.

I was suggesting that now if you do not have an Engine OS device that has this functionality, you can analyze all the tracks on a USB and create an Engine library. So, different path, but to the same goal.

That’s not my typical use case, but I thought it was worth mentioning in case people search for a solution, as I wasn’t finding any of these details online, other than third-party programs trying to get me to pay them for it.

The primary use case is after obtaining a drive with absolutely no library, but a bunch of tracks on it, analyzing those tracks and creating the library on the USB, which is now something I understand how to accomplish.

Thanks

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True, but using an Engine OS device, you would at least get all RekordBox playlists, cues and loops. However, not the bpm and analysis info.

With Engine Desktop you would, in essence, start fresh.

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