What to do with my $6000 SC6000M Paper Weights

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OK, I’m not sure where to post this as there are multiple things I’m not happy with after jumping from Serato after 15 Years. I’ll preface the following by saying that the media players are by far most superior hardware on the market at the moment, hence why I’m here.

The software on the other hand is well, yeah. Start soap box rant…

  1. Database management - There have been a number of issues here. Engine DJ has a mind of its own. If you move or delete a file, there is no way to relocate it easily or to delete it from the database. Other platforms provide that functionality.

I could not update my crates after making changes to Serato. The so called Sync Manger listed the new crates, but I was unable to transfer them to to the SC6000M players that have SSD drives inside. I had to deleted the collection and reimport it for this to work correctly. This has happened twice in the first 3 music transfers.

Can someone at Denon explain to me why I have to import the collection twice? Once via Serato that I connect initially and then via the Engine Library. If I import Serato as my sole collection, I expect it to be my Engine. Why have a seperate Engine library for users coming to the Denon eco system? That’s just a recipe for disaster and it is. It makes the import process more complicated than it needs to be and confuses new users. (Check your forums)

I’ve found out the hard way that you have to drag and drop files and folders to the Engine library to get everything work correctly and work is a loose term here.

  1. I spent two hours using the rating system the other day because there is only a colour rating system in Serato. Only a partial amount of the files updated on one player and the other didn’t update at all. Why? :rage:

  2. At the weekend gig I was having major latency issues between the mixer and the SC6000M players. Because there is no unified play back history available via Engine OS or Engine Dj, I decided to share a single Samsung EVO SSD drive from one player to another via the X1850’s network hub to see if it consolidated all songs played to a single history file on the player.

File loading was slow in crates and there was lag loading a file to the shared player.

Several times there were issues where the BPM of the track would slow down to half speed. A track that was 120BPM would slow down to 60BPM and then speed up to 120BPM after I increased the speed of the pitch fader slightly.

In addition, at the end of the night I lost the ability to cue a song on the left media player on layer 1 on channel 1 of the mixer. I have the layers connected via digital cables to the back of the mixer. The meters indicated that audio was reaching the channel, but there was no cue audio.

There have been other posts recently about this with little or no information coming from Denon support. I could do with some answers please, not theories. This is quite disconcerting when this happens in the middle of a major gig.

  1. Why does ‘Year’ meta data not import into Engine Dj? It’s been a known issue on the forums for over 2 years and is still not fixed.

  2. Why can’t I see comments on the players? You have everything else on there and only half of the 10" screen is used. An option to use 3\4 or full screen would be nice and the ability to read comments.

  3. Why can’t you select two options to sort the files in a folder on a player? E.g. BPM and Genre. This is much easier than backing out to specific genre lists IMO.

  4. Why can’t we update the star ratings or file info from the players? You have edit function to add to a play list, why not a secondary option to edit selected song?

  5. Why is there no consolidated history like Traktor, Serato and Rekordbox? Syncing back tracks played to two seperate history lists is useless and there is no option to merge them in Engine Dj?

Sorry for the long post and rant, but after 15 years on Serato with minimal issues and spending $8000 on equipment to change eco systems, I’m a little frustrated and disappointed that basic functionality is not working properly or not available and has been on other platforms for years.

From my perspective, Denon should be concentrating on getting Engine OS & DJ up to speed and not trying to do everything Pioneer is not for 5 different Dj platforms and introducing touch effects when clearly there are a number of basic issues still present.

Thanks for any help on the above.

Cheers

Dean Charles

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Serato import is only ever meant to be used as your initial data load from other software, not as a means of keeping your Engine library up to date.

You should be adding new music to your engine library in the same way as you would with any other software.

No other DJ software offers any data load from other programs, so this ‘feature’ is unique to Engine in that it makes the initial data load from other programs much easier.

The lag issue has been discussed on other threads and it seems there are certain types of SSD that perform much better than others, as per the user who had the initial issue changing their SSD and seeing a much improved performance, it might be worth reading those threads for some advice.

The rest of your post i cant answer.

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While paper weights is a bit harsh, considering you’re getting some use out of the system (they don’t appear to be bricked, right?) and they also work as controllers, anyway, you do have some reasonable suggestions and observations as far as I can see. So, that’s usefully constructive criticism that only borders on rant, IMO.

I’ve never bothered much with Engine Desktop or even Rekordbox other than using them to create a simple, searchable database, which is oddly more difficult to do in Engine Desktop compared to Rekordbox, but it does seem like search and sorting are weak on options currently in Prime. I also tend to think InMusic should spend more man hours on improving the firmware & software than new hardware models, but I’m increasingly assuming they’re mostly different employees doing each, so it probably doesn’t have much impact.

My biggest continuing gripe, though, is spending over $5,000 on Prime gear that has 100X the IMD and a couple dB roll off in the highs compared to the competition, equivalent to running something like Traktor set up incorrectly for a given set of music files and audio interface. But if you use a high-end enough headphone or sound system and only lossless files, you barely even notice it… barely. I’ve graduated to electrostatics on mine. Distortion and inaccuracy is cumulative, after all. I do get a lot of use out of Tidal lately and the X18xx headphone options.

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Of course. What I’m saying, is why isn’t directly injected into the Engine library? If I continue to use Serato as my music management location and then sync with Serato again, I shouldn’t have to start dragging files into the created Engine collection. You should only have to see the collection on the initial import. After that, the Serato sync button should be used to update the created Engine collection and dj’s shouldn’t have to start dragging files and folders everywhere. This would also apply to Traktor, Rekordbox. or whatever platform. There is no clear indication on how to do this as a new user.

This would be handy to know somewhere more obvious on the Prime website. Serato offers a location on their site for recommended hardware as well as software settings for better performance. Some testing in the lab to recommend compatible SSD brands / drives wouldn’t go astray before we put several hundred dollars down on new devices. Having to scurry around multiple forum threads for hours on end is not a solution and using us as beta testers in the process is not a good look.

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But you have to understand, they don’t want you to use Serato or Rekordbox or anything else, they want you to use Engine desktop for your music management, just like all the other companies want you using their software. Inmusic are no different in that regard, they just seem to be paying the penalty for offering a solution to load initial data with lots of these type of complaint. I’m guessing they almost feel like they wish they hadn’t bothered…. Trying to do a good thing = receiving loads of flak for doing it.

As far as the other thing goes, I can’t comment on it, I don’t have an issue with my own unit but I made sure I invested in a good quiality SATA drive to store my music, the same way I invested in a good quality UHS-ii SD card for my camera (lots of people in photography forums complain about lag in their cameras after buying the cheapest possible card they could find).

Perhaps raise a feature request for the storage device transparency/guidance… and find the existing feature request to vote on for more enhanced Serato integration.

It might also be worth imagining what your workflow would be like if you were trying to use Serato to manage the database of the ‘industry standard’. I imagine stating to them that you shouldn’t have to manually update both pieces of software would be met with nothing more than a snigger.

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My smaller collection 400tracks loads instantly and across the network.

My normal engine collection is 33000 tracks, takes like 2-3mins to initiate and load.

I have tested with Samsung t7 and Sandisk extreme both are USB.

I feel the slow loading is due to size of the engine database. It’s been discussed to death and spending more money on SSD might not be the fix.

If I recall, your Prime 2 collection contains 6000 tracks and perhaps that’s why you don’t see any loading issues, compared to larger collections

Also factor in that you are using an all in one (prime2). Think for this issue one needs to compare like for like.

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I would if it worked properly, that’s why I’m here :wink:

You never had to with Serato. I’ve used Scratch, Itch & Dj Pro since 2008 and none of them had these sorts of issues. I think the lag issue is due to the NAT on the X1850 hub and the Engine Dj software is not fleshed out enough unfortunately.

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Workaround that open format DJ’s used before (when Engine database file was not accessible from linked player if it was over 2GB until ):

  • import your tracks with auto-analysis option set to off
  • analyze only the playlists/tracks you intend or know you will use
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I don’t understand this comment, its not addressing the discussion, those 3 pieces of software are all designed by the same company, for use on the same products so will share the same DB. Im talking specifically about going to one of the other software vendors and asking them to tap into a competitors database to manage their library.

What specific problems are you having with Engine Desktop that means you have to use Serato? as far as i can see they do largely the same thing as far as library management goes, and this is from someone who uses Serato primarly and Engine for my gig hardware.

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That is correct, i was only going off the OP of the other thread who had a much larger library and his issues were solved by changing out his SSD. He thinks it was to do with the on board VRAM… its a WD blue in my case and it works well, and was quite good value.

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I have and still do have issues with slow loading on the 2nd player occasionally this leads to the system crashing and having to restart there is no clear way to know when it will do it as some of my sets are ok but others I have issues and these issues only came about in the past six months as I did not have this problem before, i have a 1tb samsung evo SSD card which is not even half full. I am not sure whether it is the sub crates being the possible issue, I was considering maybe getting another ssd but someone advised this may not fix the problem. The idea of having the majority of my music on my SSD was one of the reasons I decided to get the players. Not sure of what the solution is

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How many tracks do you have on the 1TB evo?

And what’s the size of the Engine .db files? m.db? On the Samsung EVO SSD.

@SlayForMoney i plan to test out an unanalysed collection to see if it loads quicker. Great suggestion :+1:t5::+1:t5:

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That sounds painful. What if you don’t know where the night is going or after a few gigs you reach the safe threshold of what the db can handle again :grimacing:

The database structure surely has to change moving forward.

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Take them as they are.

Everything they are when you bought them was already on the box. More than what was on the box would have been in the many firmware updates which were available to read in many places. (They don’t re-print the boxes with all the things that new free firmware has added to the decks)

What you didn’t realise was or wasn’t on the system when you purchased might get added to engine dj or engine OS or both, or it might not. There’s nothing that says every request will transpose into a demand and will get added quickly, or ever for that matter. No system has it all.

You might want to look at Lexicon DJ for as long as you’re trying to bridge between serato and engine on a regular basis. There’s a monthly fee for lexicon, but if it does what you want and you’re an earning DJ then it’s there for you.

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I could not update my crates after making changes to Serato. The Sync Manger listed the new crates, but I was unable to transfer them to to the SC6000M players. I had to delete the collection in the Engine Library and reimport it for this to work correctly. This has happened twice in the first 3 music transfers.

I’ve also had issues with star ratings not transferring from the Engine library to the media players. One player only got half of the ratings I imported and the other player got nothing at all.

There were also orphaned files although nothing has been changed, deleted or moved. Plus you can’t remove orphaned files, so I had to use Engine Prime Cleaner from ATGR to locate two files and remove the rest.

This has been on top of latency issues with the media players and the mixer, tracks slowing down to half speed until I move the pitch fader and I lost the cue on channel one last weekend although the channel was receiving audio. It’s not been a good experience so far.

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Have you formatted your drive after the engine desktop and firmware updates? There was a DB change with 3.0 so if you haven’t id format your drive and reload the collection.

The Serato sync will only update your Serato collection in engine, not the engine collection, you then have to move them across to each playlist manually, which is why i said to only use Serato once for the initial import, once imported add your new music like you would any other software.

The slowness is an issue but for the small cost it’s worth buying another drive to test performance, if you get an improvement we then know it’s an issue with certain drives. I only have 100gb of music on mine so not enough to see the slowness in any great qty.

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You say that a lot, but it’s false. Your profile is not public, so I’m not sure if you just have selective amnesia or you haven’t had the Prime gear and been on the forum for long. Several of the original stated specifications were incorrect, incomplete, or mentioned things that were not included, and the players, both the non-M and the Ms, could not even consistently play back tracks without major glitches originally. Prime has come a long way, but some of the specs have not been adhered to and there have been enormous growing pains.

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Why not show a box then with some of those things on? Or not on?

Besides you may recall, or can be reminded, I’m sure that it has been said by denon staff on this forum that if a model doesn’t have a feature active when it comes out the box, don’t assume that the feature will definitely be added later by firmware - or words to that effect. Or will you be the one with selective amnesia?

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There’s hardly anything on the box. I’m talking about their website’s original specifications and features and the user manuals.

If you’d like a list of deviations from stated specs, features dropped, features severely malfunctioning, basic firmware glitches, and hardware design defects Prime hardware each had right out of the gate, I can start a list to refresh your memory.

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Also there’s far more things that got added than taken away. Remember how there was no mention on boxes, websites, machine specifications etc about wifi built in - and we can all remember the amazing surge of posts that appeared when all the WiFi services started appearing - and that to was offered above advertised spec and implemented free of charge.

As denon prime owners we’ve certainly been given (free) far more features than any other brand ever added to existing models and ecosystems