I have now encountered the infamous Corrupt database on BOTH my main Engine drive as well as my Backup Engine drive.
I was working on synchronizing music from the Main Engine SSD to my Backup drive, manually moving files, etc when Windows froze. The system would not release itself and eventually had to be restarted.
Hoping against all odds that EP would write or update itself at the point I was at when it crashed, I restarted and immediately received the corrupt Database message on BOTH drives.
This was after moving and curating the Engine library for Months!!! AGHHHH
Fortunately, I have some knowledge of databases, computer systems and the wisdom of this forum from past posts on this issue.
Here is the process I used to recover the full database with all crates, history, and playlists. It seems the analysis data is the main portion of the database that becomes corrupt (P.db) while the crates, etc ( M.db) files seems unscathed.
Here’s my recovery process: For External drives. Internal may be the same but I can’t vouch for that.
- Make sure EP is shut down.
- Rename the “Engine Library” folder to something like “Old Engine Library”.
- Open Engine prime and the drive should now show nothing in the collection for the drive.
- Click on the file system browser icon in EP to show files on the drive or navigate to the drive you want.
- Drag one file from a local folder to the “Collection” title on the affected drive. It should now show the one file when you click on collection for that drive.
- Close EP
- copy the “M.db” and the “Music” folder from the renamed “Old Engine Library” folder to the “Engine Library” folder that EP recreated. It will ask if you want to replace certain files. Say “Yes” to each.
- Open EP and now all the crates, History and playlist should reappear.
NOTE: You will need to Reanalyze ALL the files in your collection again to have the system recreate the P.db files, which can easily get very large.
Hopefully this helps. Saved me somewhat.
Also, unless you have your own filing method, I use Mixed in Key or similar program that can rewrite the filename to include the Key and BPM at the end of the file title so I know immediately what each should be, even if it’s not analyzed in EP or other programs yet.
My file name looks like this: Chris Brown-She Aint You (Radio Edit) - 10B - 91.00.mp3
I can immediately see that once analyzed, it should fall into a certain key and BPM range, otherwise EP has analyzed it incorrectly. I can now also mix the song in rotation just by quickly looking at the file name rather than depending on it to be analyzed correctly.
My two cents.
Denon, please help us out here.