Sorry if I ramble a bit here - I’m not quite sure I’m asking the right question, so I’ll give the background first.
I’ve been using a PC based playout system since about 1999 and that system has its own proprietary format, so I’ve had to start building my collection in Prime Engine from scratch since I decided a Prime 4 was the way to go forward. I’ve so far managed to convert around 5,000 tracks using a laptop, but sometimes I’d like to be able to sit in my office and use the PC to add more tracks into Prime Engine.
So the question I think I need to ask is, can I somehow copy or export the entire collection of crates from the laptop to a desktop and then back again, and if so how? The only thing I can think of so far, is to re-create all of the crates manually and import the folders of music into them and there’s going to be around 250 crates of 100 tracks each by the time I’m finished…
I know how to copy the whole lot into the Prime 4, but what about between 2 Windows machines using Engine Prime?
I am sure there is going to be more knowledgable guys than me chiming in but to point you in the right direction, I would imagine you just need to copy the engine folder from one computer to the other. Anything you do to the tracks would be saved in there. You might need both computers to have the same file structure…
Correct, both computers where the engine library is stored need to have the same location and folder structure for the engine library and your music library.
I’ve actually done this myself when migrating from my 4 year old laptop to the current one.
For me, I actually store all my music on a dedicated data drive (D:) - my engine library is also stored on that drive so all I needed to do was copy the relevant contents of drive D on my old laptop over to drive D on my new laptop.
Great approach, though I would like to note that on each computer you connect the drive to, the drive name must be the same, or Engine Prime will not recognize it as the same drive - e.g. if it is drive E: in one machine, but drive F: in another.
There are ways to enforce the same drive to have a constant letter through windows.
Wouldn’t be a good ideea to integrate into Engine Prime library settings the option to choose where to create the library and to point where it is when you already have a library and want to put it on a different drive?
Also it would be great to be able to edit Engine Prime library files in order to update the music files paths according to ones needs? For example, as long as the music folder structure is kept intact, only the drive letter needs to be updated. In will require a bit of work and attention but it will not take as long as when you have to analyze all the music files again and create cue and loop points.
I copied all the media files to the same folder locations on the 2nd PC and then the “Engine Prime Library” folder and contents. When I fire up Engine Prime on the 2nd PC, the library is empty.
Thanks, that led me in the right direction… Installed fresh and used a folder monitor to see what was being installed and where. I’d got the wrong path to the database which is actually held on Windows 10 in the following path.
C:\users[username]\Music\Engine Prime Library
Once I’d copied that from the laptop to the desktop, all good and I can see the full library and play them.
Glad to be of use.
However, in my opinion it is not a good ideea for Engine Prime to create the library database on the system drive (C:), because it requires a backup in case something goes wrong with the system drive, not to mention the fact that in the case of a very big music library the database content can get pretty big. If will be of much use if we can have the option to choose the path where to create the library database and also the option to import it directly from the path where we have it already.
Well then, I’ll raise a feature request to allow us to set the location of the media library… Please head over to feature requests and like it, so that Denon see that more than one person would find it useful!
I moved all my music to OneDrive, which syncs to a folder on each of my machines. Had to run an update query on the DB, fortunately they were all relative paths anyway so pretty straightforward.
Set the “Music” library location to the onedrive folder, and moved the engine prime db files there too.
Works great! Have to watch to ensure the DB files fully sync when I’m done, and wait until they sync on the next machine before starting up (which on wifi can take a bit, my DB is around 600MB).
But once synced it’s all good and has really improved when and where I can work (desktop at home, laptop on the road).
@groovejumper, How do you SET the location of the db files? I don’t see that as an option. I could enable iTunes library and set the location of that, but since I’m not using iTunes it won’t make any difference. This is a brand new installation of Prime Engine and I’ve imported music directly to it.
I did it by changing the location of the “Music” library in Windows, which also gives you the option of moving the files within it, and adding a file system redirect.
BUT - do this at your own peril! like the others posted, if the relative path to your music files is going to be different, your system will be 100% borked if you don’t also update the file path for each track in the database. It’s a very simple SQL statement but can be quite dangerous…
