Crates All Say Empty

Hi all So, been using Engine Prime 1.3.4 for a good while now and never had an issue. Made a couple of playlists during the week - all good. However, just been into the Engine Prime software now to get the names of a couple of tracks in the playlists and noticed that the info was all in read, like the track wasnt recognised. This was the same for every track in the playlists.

Looking further into it, all my crates are there to access, but when I do, no tracks are displayed at all. Fearing a dead hard drive, I went to the location where my music library is saved and I can see everything there, open it up, play it with VLC and Media Player etc no problems at all.

It seems like Engine Prime isnt seeing my storage drive for some reason. Any way around this please? As you can imagine, its not the best situation to be in right now!

Thanks

If I understand you correct your tracks are on an external drive. Red means track not found, which can indicate you renamed one of the containing folders at the top level which would change the file path for all tracks included in that folder.

Crates empty but crate names there indicates the external drive is not recognized by EP, or it’s m.db is replaced, or not found. I rule out damaged because then EP would throw you an error.

Would be helpfull to know your OS and how the external drive was formatted (if on MacOS including paritioning scheme).

I’ve explained the inner workings of the Prime ecosystem including how it treats removable volumes in this Ask Me Anything Live stream. (The link starts at the beginning of the EP explanation)

Thanks for your quick answer.

So, music is stored on an internal drive on my Win10 laptop, drive D:, but separate to my OS drive of course which is C:.

Tracks are red when I see them in playlists.

Crates are visible in the tree on the left hand side of the Engine window but clicking on them says they are empty - 0 tracks. I can navigate to the folder that houses the tracks in the crates though both in Engine and in Windows absolutely fine. All the tracks are still there.

Hope that helps a little but if you need any further info just let me know.

ok now we are getting somewhere :slight_smile: Your tracks are stored on the D: drive, internal drive (different volume from your startup drive).

Does the D: drive also store your “home” folder (~/)? or is your home folder on the C: drive (this could complicate things).

At the root of the D: drive there should be a folder named “Engine Library”

This is where the crates/playlists for tracks stored on the D: drive are kept (simplyfied).

Now here is what puzzles me: if the Engine Library folder on the D: drive would be moved it would result in crates with no tracks (see the AMA link for full explanation it’s complicated). However the playlists should be empty! and not in red.

Are you sure you did not modify the storage structure of your D: drive (e.g. tracks were stored in a root level folder named MyTracks and you renamed that folder to MyMusic, which would result in all tracks in the playlists in red).

Did you maybe move/rename the original Engine Library folder at the root of the D: drive while Engine Prime was open?

My Engine Library folder is at D:\Engine Library. In there are the usual *.db files.

All my tracks are stored in D:\Digital Music Library\Techno\2020 May for instance. This months techno tracks live in there. Same for other genres and months. I basically mirror that into crates. So, I have crates for techno, tech house or whatever with “subcrates” underneath for 2020 May, 2020 April and so on.

I havent actually touched the Engine Prime software since making these playlists early in the week. They all worked fine then, playlists were made, exported to USB drives as I usually do, no bother whatsoever. Its only today when I have come to check a track name that I know was in one of the playlists that this problem has come about.

The only amendments I make to the folder structure is when a new month comes and I make a folder for it. Id then make a corresponding crate for it in Prime and drag and drop my tracks from the folder to the crate. Thats about all I do with Engine really, plus make playlists.

what happens if you put a track from the drive in one of the crates (without any tracks) reboot your computer does that track stay in that crate? or disappear?

You mention a performance drive (=drive used to connect to the player) what happens if that drive is mounted? does all your crates get populated then and the playlists turn normal?

Just tried adding a track from the folder storing this months tracks to this months crate. It went through the motions of analyzing the track, but then when that had finished, the crate was still empty.

I plugged in the USB stick that I export my playlists to and they showed up in the Device Panel part as expected. I could see all the playlists on them and play tracks from them. Id expect this though as the tracks are on the USB stick. This was confirmed as it was show G:… as the location of the tracks on the USB stick. Ones in my crates are D:…

Even with the USB stick in the laptop though, no crates or playlists were available in the Engine Prime software on the laptop. So basically, anything from my D: drive. The software can see that drive though as I can navigate to it to drag and drop things from there to a crate. It goes through the motions of that as described earlier, but then nothing is in the create once that process completes.

Am I looking at a fresh start importing all my music again here? I could do with knowing one way or another soon as I have a show on Weds night and need to get some things prepared first.

How long have you been using EP 1.3.4 for?

For the sake of science, Rename Engine Folder in C and D to something else eg Engine Folder Backup 2020

Start EP, you will have an empty library as expected

Now drag your D: Digital Music Library to EP collection again.

Sounds like there is something wrong on the D: drive. What @mufasa suggests is the first trest

  1. QUIT Engine Prime (important!)
  2. Rename the folder “Engine Library” at the root of the D: Drive to “EP backup”
  3. Start EP (My bet is your crates are still there without tracks, but the playlists should be gone)
  4. add some tracks to a new crate
  5. see if they survive a reboot

Is there any way at all to get things like playlists back though? Crates I can simply re-import as @mufasa mentioned, but Id like to keep my playlists if at all possible.

nope it sounds like that has passed. But I wonder why your playlists are gone that is why I want to know if you still have the ability to make playlists when you start from scratch (which you do by renaming that folder). Because from the feedback you give (can’t add tracks) I think there is even something else at work here.

OK, I’ll give the suggestion a try later today - just started work now. I’ll also get some tests run on the physical drive holding all the music, the D: drive. However, Im fairly confident its OK as I can do everything else on that drive with no bother. It just seems to be whatever link there is between that location and Engine itself. (Im guessing thats the *.db files, just for my own curiosity)

Everything about how this works is in the recording of the stream I send you at the beginning of this thread. If tracks are on the D: drive, and your “home” folder is NOT on the D: drive, then the databases in the folder “Engine Library” at the root of your D: drive holds all information related to tracks stored on the D drive, including crate content and playlists.

Not had time to watch that video yet, being over an hour long.

Just to clarify though, what folder do you mean when you say “home” folder? On my laptop I have a standard installation on the C: drive - c:\Program Files\Engine Prime and also an “Engine Library” folder on my D: drive - d:\Engine Library. This holds the p.db file which Im guessing as Ive not watched the video yet, holds the info to my crate contents, playlists, history etc etc.

Home Folder= the OS user’s home folder. also known as ~/ it’s the containing folder of your Documents and Music folder for instance

Gotcha. Just wanted to make sure you werent referring to a folder in Prime. Yeah, home folder on c: and databases on d:

Just a quick update - drive checks have been running all afternoon and its come back OK. No bad sectors etc so physical drive health seems fine.

I’m not concerned about your drive’s health. did you add a track from that drive to a playlist/crate and did it survive a reboot?

Thought we’d already covered that.

From yesterday: “Just tried adding a track from the folder storing this months tracks to this months crate. It went through the motions of analyzing the track, but then when that had finished, the crate was still empty.”

was that with a reseted Engine Library folder at the root of the drive? or with he original folder in place?