What about formatting and reloading your drive from scratch with the new version of engine desktop? It’ll take a while but it’s worth a try to see if it resolves it.
Mine takes around 5 seconds to load the first time with an ‘updating’ message, then it’s fine after that.
Hi STU-C
many thanks for your replay and advice. My heartbeat is now a bit lower as search preparation seems to be finished. It really took 28 Minutes!!! However last week I saw that after leaving the P4 up and running it lost these search preparations so I am pretty sure I will have to go through this hassle again when I get back to the venue to start the gig…
Preparing a complete new Engine OS setup on PC and external disk is really the very last option for me as it took me several days to migrate my former Traktor Setup (these good ole days of reliability!)
Do you see the same behaviour that your P4 looses this search preparation if left switched on but untouched for let’s say 4 hours?
That’s truly iconic !
I don’t mean touching your engine desktop database, I just mean format the drive then re-export all your music to it, like a clean install.
Using the supplied high speed USB cable it should do it quickly in computer mode. I’m sure my 200gb of music only took about 20 mins to complete.
Just got Back from my Gig…it was a NIGHTMARE!!! During the Gig after appox 1.5hrs of working stable with fast search results the P4 simply lost all its search cache (or whatever is created When SSD Led blinks) …the effect: No search possible, No “Sort by BPM” or alike in a Playlist possible. But the worst: When I say “Not possible” I mean that you get a blank list for about 3 minutes after trying to search or sort a list. In fact you are blind with no access to your Tracks!!!
After another 1 hr of blinking SSD the search was back OK until the end of the Gig.
All this in a jam packed venue! I am just sick of it!
I will try to reformat my SSD to see if this helps. Otherwise I will fallback to my Traktor Setup as I have the next gig in Friday…
Just to clarify, are you talking about an internal SSD or an SD card plugged into the SD card slot? I re-read your first post and it says something about an LED flashing in the SD slot?
I’m using a Western Digital SATA SSD plugged in to the SATA port underneath my device.
HI, STU-C
I am talking of an external SSD (Samsung T7 Shield, 2GB) connected to the USB slots on top of P4.
I just tried to export my DB from scratch to this drive after formatting it…and when done (25 mins) I get the well known error “Database corrputed, please contact support”.
Then I tried to contact the support by posting a trouble ticket…EVEN THIS DOES NOT WORK (always saying “fill out the ticket completly” with all textfield filled out).
What can I say?! No music on my Prime4, no support to contact…
My honest opinion, you need to buy a SATA drive SSD of reasonable quality (see the other thread relating to hard drive issues) and install it inside the device, then use that.
The data transfer and read speeds of SATA far outweigh anything a USB port can do.
I have a Western Digital blue installed on my Prime 2, exporting my music collection to it is rapid and so is search my library.
I just found this, it looks like the ports on the top only support USB 2.0 so it’s going to bottleneck at that speed. You can plug it in the back for 3.0 but even then with that library you should really think about a SATA SSD installed in the device, it’s a game changer.
I doubt that the quality of this external disk is the issue (it wasn’t before)…and they are IMHO of decent quality.
The symptom of the current issue with “DB error” is found: The m.db file is not created (0 byte) after finishing the export.
Does anyone know how to contact Denon support ?! Their ticket frontend is not working.
I can’t help with the error as I’ve never had it, but you could try formatting again then redoing? I use ExFat when I format mine.
question: how many tracks do you have typically exported?
5500 for me personally, more lossless than lossy, taking up about 130gb of space. Others on here carry much larger DBs than I do as they are event DJs.
OK…well I have 45000 tracks (yes, I am an event DJ). Just restored the external drive library with some backup of m.db. and also tried with other SSDs. I can still reproduce the error: In a normal usage session Prime 4 suddenly falls back to blinking and blocking access to the DB and search/sort function.
How to contact Engine support with this reproducible ERROR? Anyone any Idea?
Can you try it in one of the ports near the power connector, they are USB 3.0 apparently so that will be considerably faster.
Do you also have a SATA drive laying around that you can test using it internal to the device?
If you read the screenshot from this post, the Denon dev recommends an internal drive for anything more than 500gb.
I can’t speak for Denon but bear in mind Pioneer advise people not to use anything more than something like 64gb flash drives in their CDJs.
Dear STU-C,
you just gave me the right hint!
I was wondering why I have so many problems all around the workflow of track and database management.
The only thing I NEVER tried was using an internal disk in my P4! So yesterday night I installed one (1TB Western Digital SSD) and loaded it via “Prime in PC Mode”.
After successful (!) DB sync of all(!) tracks first tests seems promising!! I’ keep testing and report further insights. But for now I can issue the Warning:
DO NOT USE YOUR PRIME 4 ONLY WITH YOUR MAIN DATABSE RESIDING ON AN EXTERNAL DISK (if you have a large track collection)
Keep us posted how you get on with it. It’s slightly more laborious to load new music (plug in USB cable, computer mode etc) but the benefits are a much faster sync time than external drives and i think much faster loading of music.
One other benefit, especially if you’re forgetful like i am (i nearly forgot my headphones last week) is the fact your music is always on the player so you dont have to worry about remembering drives.
Denon have recently added the ability to reference a computer on the network to play music, im hoping this might be a pathway into wireless sync in future as that would be a killer feature. that way you could use wired for the initial upload then wireless to add any new music.
Edit: its also worth keeping your external drive as backup too, so no harm in you having that as a secondary option, just make sure you plug it into the ports on the front of the unit.
Ok…had another Club-Gig yesterday. What can I say: All the search issues I saw were gone now with an internal SSD installed in my P4!
After booting the P4 it still takes 2-5 Minutes until all search and sort functions are fully usable but after this waiting time all tracksearch and sort/filter requests are handled fast and reliant. P4 does neither go through this index creating process again unexpectedly nor any screens are blocked when searching.
So it is safe to say: Do not use your Prime 4 in combination with large track libraries on external disks…trust me: I have learnt it the hard way…
Did you try switching sources eg go from SATA SSD to usb stick and back to the SATA again
Probably this might be helpful to this conversation in a way.
I used to have issues with searching and saving my mixes to USB drive until I realized the USB Drive read/write speeds were a big factor so I purchased “SanDisk Extreme PRO 256GB USB 3.2 Solid State Flash Drive for High Speed Transfer 420MB/s Read Speed” and I never had problems after that.
When my database and library overgrew the 256GB drive, I purchased “BUFFALO External SSD 1TB - Up to 600MB/s - USB-C - USB-A - USB 3.2 Gen 2” and it handles pretty well.
I connect them on the top USB slots without a lag in search and any other feature. I also have a internal SSD though I use it more for backup than actual playing music from. It should even be faster than the two USBs I use most of the time.
Updating: I usually don’t update my database and music via the Engine Desktop “Sync Manager” as I found it disorganizes the folders a lot and keeps the music in a way only it could understand. I still want my music in specific folders just in case I need to move/copy/or delete. So this is what I do:
FYI, my library is about 48K songs.
Hope this helps someone. Thank you.
Great to hear you got it sorted 
Imo I can’t believe the SATA drive is missing from the SC Live units as it truly sets Denon apart from the rest with fast storage options.