As much as I love to complain about the shortcomings of Engine Prime (and there are many), I’m well aware there are a bunch of DJs in certain categories that probably don’t care about the features I want. If I had to guess, they’re Drum & Bass/4 on the floor style/EDM DJs. But as an open-format DJ, the software really kills the experience, and unfortunately I still can’t get onboard with the Prime system as a whole unless Engine Prime caught up to the competition for the following reasons:
- No flexible beat grids. Warping a song to a BPM is not the same.
- No smart crates/playlists. HUGE for me since it makes it easier to sort Clean edits.
- Can’t organize crates.
- Organized playlists don’t retain their order once exported to external drives.
- No auto sync to external drives.
- Sometimes changing the color of a cue point causes the GUI to stop working (on Windows). Hitting ESC fixes this.
- Sorting playlists is a PITA. Sometimes playlists move in one click. Sometimes it takes five minutes.
- GUI needs improvements. Subtle things like not losing my place in a large crate when I open it to show the sub-crates would be beneficial.
- RGB waveforms to make it easier to visualize the frequencies in a song. Idk why Denon DJ hasn’t done this when literally, and I do mean literally, everyone else does.
- Crates are sorted incorrectly in numerical order. 100 doesn’t come before 60, so why are my 100+bpm crates above my 60+ crates?
- BPM detection is consistently wrong for songs at 102bpm. Engine Prime more often than not reads them at 68bpm. Thank God DJ pools put the BPM in the metadata.
Considering the initial marketing pitch was “change your rider”, the current popular choice for people’s riders has NONE of these issues whatsoever.