Engine Prime Crashes When Refreshing iTunes or Serato Libraries

just download Engine for mac 1.3.1 Serato 2.1.1 iTunes 12.8.2.3 Engine Prime Crashes When Refreshing iTunes or Serato Libraries And I re-download a old Version of Engine

I was having the same issue. Engine prime kept crashing when updating serato wiping anything Iā€™ve done. I noticed it kept doing it while writing tags. I had a few tracks that engine prime just didnā€™t like and crashed it so I deleted them and now all my crates, cues and loops are there in engine prime. Itā€™s ginna suck but you might have to drag/drop each track to see if itā€™s a track causing it. I hope this helps you or anyone else. Good luck!

Have had a similar issue when trying to maximise the window whilst performing a single task. Sometimes the cursor will disappear when dragging files or crates/folders etc. Minor annoyance, but something you would expect not to happen on the regular!

It could be due to my poor laptop although it ticks all the spec boxes and more so im not sure thatā€™s the issue!

I suspect as much. with 10K tracks in my iTunes library, that seems undoable. does anyone know of a utility to weed out potential corrupt or bad tracks?

Iā€™ve just refreshed my iTunes library and now getting the aforementioned crash cycle.

Was there ever a solution to this issue?

Desperate to get fixed and playing again!!!

Hi @ilfitz - Welcome to the community!

It may be worth temporarily renaming the ā€˜Engine Libraryā€™ folder within your Music folder to see if something in the current database is causing the crash. This will open Engine Prime without any collection and give you a fresh start. Just be sure to make a backup before you attempt to rename or remove your Engine Library folder.

Hi - that seems to have worked. I can get Engine Prime to open up now with no collection.

Do I need to add everything to collection again?

Thanks for reply

So, that confirms that one of the database files is preventing the application to open. Unfortunately, there is not yet a way to restore without a working backup of the folder. Did you have a lot of work (hotcues, playlists, etc.) already prepared in Engine Prime?

If not, I would suggest starting with the fresh collection and rebuilding. I understand this may be time consuming but is the best way forward at the moment.

We are planning to add better recovery options in a future update.

Ok thanks for getting back to me again.

Whatā€™s the best option for creating a working back up?

Iā€™m planning on inserting tracks into my collection again, but in batches of 50 or so at a time.

Iā€™d then ideally save a back up and be covered if the next batch had the corrupted file. Correct?

About creating a backup: All the relevant Engine Prime databases are stored in the folder named ā€œEngine Libraryā€ (EL)

This folder can be found at:

  • your user level Music folder (~/Music/)
  • At the root of every drive that contains tracks for Engine Prime, including e.g. the Prime 4 internal drive.

To Backup:

  1. Quit Engine Prime (important!)
  2. duplicate the EL folders (all of them!)
  3. rename the duplicates so you can easily identify them (e.g. EL backup 2020/04/11)

In case of troubles:

  1. Quit Engine Prime (important!)
  2. Rename all the EL folders to something else e.g. ā€œEngine Library BAKā€
  3. Start Engine Prime, all should be fine, with an empty collection if this step fails itā€™s your OS or Engine Prime that is the problem, not the databases
  4. Quit Engine Prime
  5. Rename 1 ā€œEngine Library BAKā€ back to ā€œEngine Libraryā€
  6. restart Engine Prime, if EP starts, then repeat the previous step with another BAK folder the one that fails contains the broken database.

To restore from a backup

  1. Locate the problematic EL folder (see the in case of troubles part)
  2. Rename the duplicate of the duplicated folder from ā€œhow to create a backupā€ for the troubled EL folder,
  3. rename that duplicate of the duplicate to ā€œEngine Libraryā€
  4. start Engine Prime, it should be at the restored state

Now regarding your iTunes import to Engine Prime. The current version of EP has 2 limitations:

  • itā€™s all or nothing, which can make it take some time
  • If a track is already part of the EP collection and you changed its tags in iTunes/Music.app then those changes are NOT imported.

If you are on MacOS there is an alternative, which does not have those limitations and it automatically maintains 4 levels of backups for your databases. See this tutorial for more

And this might be of interest to you as well (maintaining the exact Serato STATIC grid/BPM among many other extra features)

In the scheduled Ask Me Anything Iā€™ll be doing a demonstration of:

  • conversion from Serato (and I can throw iTunes in the mix) to a Denon Prime performance drive
  • Set some extra cues/loops on the SC5000 (could be any Prime player incl the Prime 4 or Prime Go)
  • Convert everything from that performance drive, including the cues and loops set on the player all back to the original Serato collection I started with.

Thanks for this detailed reply.

My trouble first started when I tried to create a copy of my music folder in the cloud.

Stupidly, I dragged and dropped, so moved it rather than copied/duplicated it.

This made all my files go ā€˜redā€™ in Engine. Thought Iā€™d bite the bullet and just import my entire iTunes library to Engine collection. Then it crashed.

Ever regret starting something?

Cheers

Fitz