There’s one thing I don’t really get about the use of the USB drives in Engine DJ/OS:
Why is there a Drives Section in the File Browser? Why should I mess with the tracks on the stick at all? I don’t need to select playlists to update or copy files in either or other direction. And I certainly don’t want to have a track restored from the stick that I 100% intentionally deleted from my library.
The concept behind this may be the idea that a stick should have its own library and you could have different sticks for different uses. But I find this overly complicated. Sticks are big and can hold a complete library.
I want my USB to be just a mirror of my computer library. When I remove a track on either, it should be removed on the other. Same with changes in Cues, Metadata, Playlists, History. How do I have to set-up and use Engine DJ to behave exactly like this?
ATM I sync the stick with the library (stick->pc) an then in the other direction with all playlists selected.
Thank you for any advise. If it is not possible with the actual program version, please consider the question as a feature request
Exit from the Engine DJ Desktop software. You must completely erase your remote unit.
Copy your “Music” folder completely from your internal HD to your remote drive, always keeping the same folder name. It must be located in the root of the remote drive. In short, if your remote drive is “F:” you will find the path “F:\Music.…” and within them you will find your MP3 files and your Engine database.
Now make a copy of your music folder that you have in your HD inside the PC, for example call it “Music_Copy”, so it will not be found by EDJ Desktop but it will not be lost anyway and you can always go back. Then delete all the contents of your original “Music” folder.
Start EDJ Desktop: if you have your remote drive connected to the PC, you will see your collection with your previous tracks and playlists. Obviously if you remove the remote unit, you will get an EMPTY collection. Therefore you will always have to work with the remote unit connected.
Now every new MP3 track you buy, you need to save it in the remote drive, along with the other tracks in the "F: \ Music " folder. Then you will have to import it into EDJ Desktop using drag & drop or the other methods you used previously.
Now you must be aware that everything you will do, you will do on your remote unit. In this way you have the advantage that as soon as you have analyzed and edited your tracks, you can also remove the remote unit and you will be ready to play on the console without any export or sync manager. But all your files will be lost if you break that remote drive.
The solution to get an always up-to-date mirror is to use an automatic backup or synchronization software that copies the contents of your remote drive to your HD inside the PC in a backup folder that can be used or restored in case of emergency.
Not quite what I want: My music folder on PC contains a lot of music I never use for DJing. There are tracks I play on a gig that are parts of an album I want to keep complete for casual listening but I don’t need the other tracks from the album on the USB. I am talking only about my collection in EDJ, that’s what I called “my library”, not my complete music folder.
Then you are somewhere in the middle between 2 concepts.
What DjAj proposes is indeed a complete copy of all music on your harddrive, but that’s more or less your original story, apart from that we assumed that you would have added all music on your harddrive to your Engine Library. Then you could indeed manually copy your whole Engine Library to your USB stick, and all the tracks it references, or, by lack of a good (python?)script which goes over all track entries in your database to copy the referenced MP3 files, copy your whole Music folder. In your case that might be a waste of disk space, but it gets what you want. More or less.
I think the workflow with “syncing” is more or less meant to have alle MP3’s on your computer in Engine DJ, and selectively add tracks, which you want to DJ, to playlists. And then even select those playlists to sync them to a USB stick. Which is also “more or less” what you want
But there’s no pun intended above, I completely understand. Originally I myself synced my whole library to a USB stick, using a DIY script, which actually copied my Traktor library to a Engine Library on a USB stick, and copied all the referenced files to that stick. But then I realized there were a lot of tracks in that library that I did not use, so I decided to go the standard “syncing playlists” way, which I feel also gives a more reliable way to back things up (time machine just includes my main library), and I am able to add tracks to playlists on my players…
Regarding syncing deleted tracks from a USB stick, yes, that’s a big caveat! If you delete a track from a playlist within your computer’s library, that track is back when you plug in a USB stick which has the original playlist in it. Always delete tracks from playlists with your USB stick connected, and make sure that you dont plug in “old rediscovered” sticks! To me that’s a serious bug, and I made 2 bug reports and a feature request out of it, but Denon is probably too busy to cater for “bloatware junks” instead of making the basics reliable. You can vote for it though: https://community.enginedj.com/t/syncing-removed-tracks-from-playlist-between-os-and-desktop/40966
A big issue I have is I can’t see any of my notes I make on my tracks. this is only in the hardware; on the software side of things, we have a place to add comments on each track and none of it can be viewed in the hardware.
