Unified USB stick format?

Engine DJ Hardware Media Players
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Hey guys,

I’m DJing for some 25 years now, and have been lucky enough to enjoy a few years of DJing with vinyl and CDs. While that was heavy lifting to and from the gig, it had one advantage: it worked. You showed up with your records, and if the CD player was Denon, Pioneer, Numark, JBSystems, Gemini, or whatever, it would do the job more or less. And if you even looked funny at the cabling behind the mixer, technicians would be angry at you. But since I have been DJing digital all I have been hearing: this works with that, that doesn’t works with this. You have to crate a custom mapping. That isn’t supported. And it became standard practice to connect gear to a live mixer…

Now, I’m extremely gassing over the SC6000: nice features player-wise, but also a big ass screen to scroll through your tracks. Hooray, one can leave the laptop behind one would think, gone are then days of hassling with cables in the booth during a gig… But then I just get more of this bull: a Denon stick won’t work with Pioneer, Traktor doesn’t support it, blah blah blah. Which leads me back to: if you want to use anything other than Pioneer, bring it yourself. If you don’t want to do that, use Pioneer.

And you know what’s funny? Everyone is looking at converters, ans eagerly expecting HID support and so on. But not one single time I have heard something about standards!

We have a serious lack of standards with digital DJing. Can you imagine this with CDs? Suppose I got to the gig: “oh no, Pioneer, my CDs arent compatible, they only work in Denon (which was top of the line back then, before Pioneer DJ even existed). Oh no, I can’t play tonight…”. No. Magically all CDs worked with all CD players. All USB pheripals work with all laptops. That’s not magic, it’s some hard work from manufacterers who realized they had to co-operate to achieve anything. And this isn’t happening in DJ-land. Otherwise we would long have a unified database format?

And yes, one could argue that Pioneer won’t open up for obvious reasons. But hey, the only reason they could make it this far is because the open standard which is “CD”. If all brands would have had proprietary formats Pioneer would not be as big as they are today, Denon has long been the top dog in the age of twin 19" CD players. And then Pioneer got the luck to be top dog when digital revolution struck and now is being cocky about it… It seems to me when Denon starts to talk with other brands they can still overcome this…

my 2 cents… :wink:

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You would be surprised how many DJ I know that just put a bunch of files on a usb stick, no database, no cuepoints and just play with that. In every player. When you know your music you don’t have problems.

But when you download new music daily and rely on waveform to mix things get more complicated.

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I would love to see standardization. Unfortunately copyrights behind database formatting leaves that a very grey area. What I do, is just use rekord.cloud (used Rekordbuddy before it went open source and damien had to dip out for a while) to keep all 5 libraries in sync. Rekordbox 6 handles my master library, then everything is synced from there. I’m ready to go no matter what is in the booth.

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I’m with you, but all cds were not the same, I used to have problems with my burned cds in players time to time back in the day.

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@hellnegative: Well, I’m trying to figure out a user friendly way of syncing. The above is partially out of frustration that this ain’t going well.

You see, I exported my traktor 34000 track library to Pioneer and Engine Prime. That went OK, albeit that took me 5 days. And I didn’t even make USB sticks (which seem to hang on Pioneer for starters…).

But then I did some cleaning uop of my library, moved some tracks to the correct directory, deleted others, moved some tracks to playlists, and tried to sync that back from Traktor to Denon and Pioneer. Well, that again takes a few hours, and then you notice Engine Prime starts to analyse everything again. I didn’t even try to sync Engine Prime to Rekordbox, as you would want all loops that would be made on a SC 6000 you own to get over there in Rekordbox for when you play out at a bigger event where you don’t take your own gear.

I can’t see this working in real life, If I for instance move a 100 tracks, and buy some more the day I go spinning, I never will have all my libraries updated in time. Last 5 days I have been more busy with the technical part of my library than really sorting tracks in the artistical way. Traktor may be a hassle to connect at the event you’re playing, but that goes quicker than importing from Rekordbox to Prime and vice versa…

@DJBigMaxxx: I don’t remember having problems with written CDs. I do remember having problems with copy protection on bought CDs when Pioneer started to put CD ROMs in their players. But that was only a problem for 2 years, I believe early 2000’s. Record companies soon realized copy protection would prevent airplay… Oh, and scratched CDs, but that is a whole different story, you can break harddrives too…

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FAT 32 USB stick should work with common DJ media player - the standard ?

exFat, AFPS, HFS, NTFS are not compatible on some units

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I’ll buy 10-15 tunes the day of a gig on the regular. Rekordclouds companion app makes syncing take less than ten seconds. :wink:

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Eh? Is the format/layout of a database even copyrightable?

That aside, all it would take is the main DJ companies to have a little get together and decide on a universal, open format. They (mainly Pioneer) won’t though, Serato and Engine are mostly interchangable at this point I think, or at least you can import both into the other.

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This is like saying that it would be great if every person in the world spoke the same language. Just one language across and around the world.

It’s a great idea, but I think every country would say their way is better than the other ways because … and so it will probably never unify to one language for the world or one format for DJ software library’s

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As it comes for the language - every country can speak their own. But if a foreigner visits - best is to use English - as it is the main international communication language. Same goes for the dj media players - everyone can have its own “best” system, but it is good for us all when other file systems are supported and readable.

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This is how what I normally do, I set hot cues before I transition. I will say proper beat grids are lovely for quick loops.

Take off auto analysis in settings.

Not quite the same. The standard for hi-def/4K DVD’s is Bluray. At one point it was that and HD DVD. It was silly you had some movies that were released on one format or the other plus you had to buy two DVD players. It was ridiculous. Also, many industries have standards through federal or regulatory agencies but are allowed to do business the way they want. For example, large corporations must follow GAAP when journalizing, posting, and preparing financial statements.

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I think what would happen if a DJ standard data format came out, would be all the main makers would still keep their own database with all sorts of special and extra fields, unique to their own system, bit would also write a dumbed down database for the DJ standard data format. This would give DJs benefits if they keep things loyal , but bare-bones basic data if they have to use the standard DJ format.

We’re seeing this already in a way with ID3 tags. There “sort of” is a industry standard, bit loads of makers and DJs Mis-use the fields. A DJ might bot want to know the record label of a track, so Mia-uses that field for their own data like “mixes well with…”

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Rekordbox still has it’s rekordbox XML that needs reimporting, which takes 2 hours or more with my collection… Which renders it, well, useless except for one time moves from DJ software X to Rekordbox.

[quote] This is like saying that it would be great if every person in the world spoke the same language. Just one language across and around the world.

It’s a great idea, but I think every country would say their way is better than the other ways because … [/quote] That’s funny you mention it. With USB you have, besides the electrical standardization, also something like “class compliant” devices. So you don’t have to install drivers for even a 32 channel sound card. Apple once decided that non-class compliant drivers where deprecated, because class compliant was so main-stream right now, and kernel extensions are very sensitive to bugs, leading to kernel panics. But guess which DJ hardware manufacturer had problems with it’s drivers?? Pioneer! That was and still is practically the only manufacturer which keeps having it’s own drivers. Oh no, and not a unified one. a separate one for each and every piece of hardware they brought on the market! It’s making me angry that that sort of company, who refuses to even uses class-compliant drivers, who at one time even got away with removing XML export functions, who doesn’t really innovate, keeps such a grip on the rental and club market. But the Romans already said it: divide and conquer. As long as everybody else is also doing their own thing they will get away with it. I’m curious if their next mixer will use class compliant drivers or not, which is a good example of all the rest of the industry choosing an entirely different path…

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Rekord Cloud doesn’t import the XML. It reads and writes to your Rekordbox 6 library directly. My library is at 47,000+ songs now. Syncing between all 5 takes about 10 seconds.

You are correct about Pioneer’s driver issues. Pioneer never updates their driver signing either.

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That’s interesting to hear. Guess I should try it out then…Rekord Cloud does Engine Prime too?

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The S7 and S11 are class compliant on MacOS

I have the 11.

I think they are beginning to see the light :bulb:

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Yes. It works for Engine, Rekordbox, Serato, Traktor and VirtualDJ

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Hey hellnegative,

I just bought a license of rekordcloud, installed the companion app and uploaded my traktor library through it. But I can only seem to find functionality to download entire libraries, and especially only rekordbox.xml files…

Do you care to share the setup process? Small difference is that Traktor is my main/production library at the moment…

Thanks in advance, Johan

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  • Select Upload Library

  • Choose Traktor

  • Select Start Uploading

  • After completed, go to Home

  • Select Download Library

  • Select Engine Prime

  • CLick on SHow Options

  • CLick the checkbox next to Lock All Beatgrids

  • Select Start Downloading

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Rekord.cloud has been upgraded to a standalone product called Lexicon. It’s free in open beta!

I currently can EASILY create the all media stick you are talking about. Currently I have a drive that does engine, serato, rekordbox, all managed and maintained by lexicon. Exports take 20 seconds… Quite literally this solution exists today.

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