That's it, I'm done with it

Thank you, I do understand what you mean and will be sure to pass this info on. Personally, I use the WASH OUT effect a fair bit as that does have a nice long tail effect.

New FX are on a list but we have to manage these with improvements, fixes etc. I hope there will be some in the next few updates. On a positive note, if you’d bought any other mixer you’d be stuck with the same hardware FX for life :slight_smile:

Regards J

True - On any hardware mixer. Very very true

Yes, but I did not bought a mixer but a whole system meant to replace Serato, which is much more flexible in terms of updating FXs.

Not buying it. You give no details.

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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.

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The first thing a denon should do is to improve the analysis of bpm files. and switching between the BPM Range is a failure. The song can be recorded live, it can have bpm variables. Music RNB, RocknRoll, Rock, is totally totally wrongly analyzed. The analysis of the song should change in flight.

If you analyze bpm incorrectly, then using effects, quantize and perfect loops does not work.

I have a question. I made a loop manually with quantization off. Loop came out wrong and wants to improve it, shorten it. How to do it ???

X1800. The Echo effect is too short. In the pioneer I used the spiral effect every moment. When I made acapella or made a transition between songs. There is no spiral effect in Denon and the echo that is there is hopeless.

X1800. Timbre. I have problems with it because the music sounds bad although I have files in flac quality and a good sound system. I wrote this in this post Bad Sound in X1800 HELP

I play badly when it does not work as it should. On the pioneer I could play with my eyes closed, without headphones.

Summarizing. If the basics are badly done, all super-functions are not useful.

Just like in the sound system - Just one faulty cable and nothing works right away. The same applies to the quality of files. Even if we had an Adamson or L’acustic sound system and they played with mp3 128kbps, it will still be bad

Sorry for my English

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I understood everything you said.

The BPM algorithm needs fixing

Amen.

Even most of the promo videos I have seen from Denon seems to favour that style or just button bashing ones or piano ones.

Someone sincerely help me to understand this: Someone (a verified forum user and Denon DJ customer) posts a frustrated ‘I’m mad as hell’-style post, and a bunch of forum people (including a Denon DJ employee account) grill him for specifics, etc. The OP acquiesces with a set of opinions on why they posted what they did. Posters lambast OP for stating an opinion. Not really a fantastic precedent to set here. Before long, no one will want to post an opinion or a bug/finding that might appear to clash with the Denon DJ party line. At the end of the day this will affect Denon DJ, inMusic, and the private shareholders of inMusic.

Before this thread, I just finished reading/seeing the following remarkable post from a now closed thread (posted by another Denon DJ employee).

This reply is not aimed at anyone or at any group. (Edits: I made a few edits to clean up, stylistically, my late night post. )

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Well, on a positive note, at least, it doesn’t appear Lotzo has given up. EP is working to some extent and he’s giving constructive criticism.

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JWILL’s remark to Reti was valid. Inner workings, we don’t need to know.

As for the “bashing”. OP stated NOTHING. If someone wants to share their frustration, fine, but it took him a day to explain why calling it all a disaster. He should have put the explanation in the first post to start a discussion. And even after that there was no disaster.

That, to me, is simply a clickbait. (Hence my response “goodbye”.)

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We are all seeing this a lot and it’s a pattern - some new model comes out and people who own a different, older model bash it blindly, without ever having laid a finger on the new model. We can all guess that the same jealousy fuels those trolls or haters to jump onto the forum for the first time, or first time in a long time and read a few posts of what other, genuine owners have said, and they simply repeat, or amplify and repeat those comments, usually louder and with a few more explicit comments than the original, patient, poster used. All this, from a hater who doesn’t actually own the/any Denon DJ gear.

Some people just light fires for the hell of it.

I’ve seen it on forums regularly too when firmware comes out. A whole load of “new” members suddenly sign up to complain that the new firmware or new software patch on a program took too long, or was minor, or had a feature which some would find detrimental, or still missed out the feature they pleaded for since when ever. Again, a lot of these “sign up to moan” newbies probably don’t own what they’re moaning about… just moaning about something that’s made whatever product they’re infact using, a little more outdated and a little lower in resale value and a little more behind the times.

It happens

It happens a lot

It happens again and again and again

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Is this really what you believe is going on?
“NEWS ALERT: Teenagers are registering accounts on obscure electronics message boards and pretending to own machines in order to complain about latest firmware issues - which is clearly wrong because that was the greatest single firmware upgrade in the history of firmware upgrades - what is this world coming to??!!!”

Remember the good ol’ days when we were waiting for the greatest firmware upgrade of all time ever? sigh

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i don’t get it what u mean ? :thinking:

I would argue it would be more beneficial to everyone, both Denon DJ and their customers, if people stop congratulating them for doing something they’re supposed to do - read: keep their hardware up to date and functioning - a year after the previous firmware update mind you, and to commend them for at least doing something while still pushing for a more robust ecosystem. The Prime series will not be as robust as it should be so long as Engine Prime remains lackluster.

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Playing devil’s advocate here, but …

How would Denon, or any other manufacturer, for that matter, know that they are doing something that works, if people don’t tell them that, Feedback is critical, in my opinion. It has to be balanced, of course - when things are not good, the negative feedback is just as important.

For my part - I love the Prime gear - I stopped mixing on my 1200’s when the digital market took off, and record shops like Swag and Apple in Croydon closed their doors - sad times indeed. The Pioneer gear never really flicked my switch - no offence intended, just personal opinion. The Prime kit, however, is simply awesome, and has reignited my passion for electronic music. I look forward to more surprises along the way - am sure there’ll be a few. The recent streaming announcement was great news indeed.

Having said that - I agree with your comments re: Engine Prime - that needs quite a bit more development. Again, am looking forward to seeing how Denon develop that, now that WiFi is an option.

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S a l e s
A n d.
O r d e r s

A fair comment - I agree. I still believe that feedback is important too though.

There’s a difference between giving them feedback - like I did on things that should be added to Engine Prime - and congratulating them for updating it a year later with very few, if any, fixes. To be completely honest nothing was fixed within Engine Prime, and I’ve been giving them the same exact feedback for months. I’ll always congratulate them on having superior hardware, though. Their hardware is vastly superior IMO than the competition and I LOVED using it during a demo back in 2018…probably why I’m so disappointed with the software.

I’m also not satisfied with how long it takes to receive an update. The competition at one point was, quite literally, once a month. When their software was in its infancy in terms of performance and not simply exports, it was updated monthly until it got to the functioning state it’s in today, even with a better backbone. Nowadays they only update it when a sizeable bug is found or new hardware is released and needs to be supported. Denon DJ doesn’t have that luxury. They’re playing catch-up. You don’t have the luxury of updating once a year, or once whenever you feel like it, when you’re trying to catch up to your competition. I understand software updates aren’t easy and can cause potential breaks. I used to work in IT, I’m well aware of updates breaking more than they fixed. But a solution isn’t to send some of your official forum spokespeople and tell us that. The solution is to work on small fixes at a time, ensuring they don’t break anything, then release them. That’s why it’s 1.x.x, not 1.x or going from Engine Prime 1 to Engine Prime 2. That connotation represents small incremental updates in the first place. Why not utilize the power of them?

Denon DJ’s update schedule should be “fix small thing A, make sure it doesn’t break anything else, release”. Repeat with B, repeat with C, until you can roll out a bigger update that either adds a new feature or fixes a bunch of stuff the previous update didn’t. You don’t just roll out one giant update a year later that barely even fixes anything wrong with Engine Prime.

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Well it could have been Traktor and gone completely to sleep for about two-three years right after launching the S5/S8 hardware, making everyone wonder if they’d completely pulled out of the market. (admittedly, Traktor did have more evolved software to sleep on)

Yes, when an essential platform that you have serious $$$ invested in goes quiet and vague for so long, it’s incredibly frustrating and it’s only natural to expect big things when they do finally release something.

I’m rooting for Denon’s every success because of the good design decisions and innovations they’ve made. What frustrates me isn’t so much a blind sense of entitlement but concern they are fumbling the ball at a critical time and this great hardware isn’t going to fulfil it’s true potential until the window of opportunity has passed (for both them and me!)

The optimist in me says: The Spring Update is a good start and hopefully step one on a new roadmap, turning over a new leaf of development and community communication. The mention of a Summer update already suggests a move to quarterly updates for feature releases (probably with a few minor bug fixes in the mean time)

From what I’ve seen, they’ve acknowledged BPM detection is an issue they are taking it seriously. This is the biggest, low hanging fruit and, hopefully, after all the criticism and all the time it’s taking, it’ll be great rather than passable. It does need to come pretty swiftly.

The resource-hogging wizz-bang sizzle features are interesting and exciting but they need to always keep a good eye on the basic quality of life stuff when it comes to core features. Otherwise it’s a house built on sand.

By the time we see the results of what I assume will be the summer update, the new NZ development team will be more settled in their new role, more familiar with the code and hopefully more productive.

Fingers crossed the Prime 4 sells wonderfully and Denon can justify throwing good money at even more talented team members that will enrich the entire ecosystem for all of us.

I understand the reasons for keeping tight lipped in a cutthroat competitive industry and the difficulty of setting expectations when dealing with ever-shifting projects but community communication is really key.

I’d love to see a broader beta program open up for those of us eager to get our hands dirty.

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I am more than happy to join the ranks of hand dirtiers.

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