Honestly is there any way to do this that isn’t sitting with two screens, one with Engine, and one with Rekordbox, and manually recreating my set with all the cues in Rekordbox by looking at Engine? There has to be a better way… or maybe there is and I can’t find it by searching? (totally possible)
I love my Denon stuff but I need to be able to go and play on Pioneer players sometimes.
I strongly believe Denon needs to put this into their software, probably right in the Sync Manager section. When third-party developers want to make a new Photoshop competitor (such as Affinity or Pixelmator, two really great apps) they don’t say “it’s up to Adobe to add support for our format”… they wisely include the ability to read and write the dominant competitor’s formats. Likewise, Apple Pages and Google Docs can import and export Microsoft Word… I could go on and on. Denon needs to do the same. They can already read Pioneer so the reverse should be pretty simple problem to solve programmatically.
Denon reading rekordbox data is one thing … writing out in rekordbox format is probably a whole big deal more … maybe even legal issues.
Pioneer have stopped rekordbox 6 from exporting whole library data , probably out of Prime fear, so I wouldn’t expect any assistance or permission given from that direction
The cat who makes Rekord Buddy has said Engine Prime support is coming in the next version. That should help with this, but the specific implementation remains to be seen.
It woudl be great but unfortunately I dont’ think this will happen. Denon has already done something that the others (Pioneer DJ, Traktor, Serato DJ) haven’t done, which is adding the ability in their sofware to read the competitors formats.
Because of some to the venues that I play in and other equipment in my arsenal, have a need to maintain a Serato DJ-friendly library. My process is using Serato DJ as my primary music management software and then mirroring any changes, etc. in EP.
It would be great if the manufacturers would agree on one unified platform. Then again, it would be great if Apple & Android worked together too (don’t hold your breath).
I gave several examples in my original post of apps with lower market shares that have the ability to read and write the formats of their much more dominant competitors. This kind of thing happens all the time in the software world, every single day. It has nothing to do with Denon or Pioneer “working together” or standardizing on one standard database format. Of course those two scenarios are unlikely to ever happen any time soon — although the industry standardizing on a database format at some point in the future would be beneficial to everybody.
There is no technical reason that Engine Prime should not be able to write out to Pioneer USBs, something they can already read in.That would in itself be a killer feature for Engine Prime and bring it a lot more users who are hesitant for this very reason.
But there might be a legal one. There’s a legal thin grey fuzzy line between competition, monopolies, compatibility and intellectual property.
When Open Office came out it wasn’t going to get anywhere if it couldn’t open, edit and save at least some fairly good percentage of original Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. But even today, if you use particular Table features in Word, particular macros in Excel, or certain slide transitions in PowerPoint, open office won’t play nice with the document; your nice straight aligned table is all left justified, your spreadsheet sits there not doing anything automatically, and your PowerPoint demo is 18 flat unanimated slides instead of an interactive environment of hyperlinks, unless you open it in a genuine Microsoft package.
Even between the online/360 and especially the Mac versions, having the original Microsoft Windows version of office is the only way you’ll get full compatibility.
Take that over to the DJ world… and I’m sure pioneer would start making sure their players only responded to all functions IF the usb stick was made by a full version of rekordbox and would refuse, or corrupt the loading of non-rekordbox saved/created data, given a firmware update or two, to achieve that. Then it adds some nasty message on the pioneer player screen of “Rekordbox serial number not found - only partial data loaded” or some such ballistics.
Universal would be nice, but it means all the games players have to see a benefit to them. It’s currently in pioneers interests to kick up a fuss against such things
It is true that none of those reverse-engineered imports and exports have full 100% compatibility in all cases. However, they are there, and work “good enough” for most people. Also OpenOffice is behind the newer LibreOffice by several years now, which is much more compatible, as is Apple Pages and Keynote, and Google Docs and Sheets. And I would say Affinity’s apps are almost 100% compatible at this point with their Adobe counterparts. At it stands right now we don’t even have partial capability, it’s literally down to running Engine and Rekordbox side-by-side and manually redoing everything.
Based on a lot of responses I see on these forums to a variety of issues I see people complain about, I get the general sense on these forums that 1: a lot of people here live in some kind of Denon bubble and 2: most people here don’t understand or don’t want to understand what the problems actually are (i.e. dismissing this issue as “Denon and Pioneer will never work together” which is not necessary). The default reaction seems to always be defend Denon, or deny that any improvements could be made. If Denon did implement some kind of Pioneer USB export, would you be opposed to that???
Maybe I’ve missed something here, but if you need Rekordbox data on your USB sticks, why don’t you do the work in Rekordbox first, then import to Engine Prime?
That’s what I’m trying to avoid. Why use Engine Prime at all then? Denon wants people to take Engine Prime seriously, right? It’s a great library manager that shows a lot of promise, but at the same time it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to fully buy-into the Engine workflow if the reality is that outside my own Denon gear, almost everybody else and every venue is using Pioneer.
The simple ability to export a USB stick that can plug in to CDJs is all it would take to solve that issue entirely. I’m not trying to use Rekordbox. The onus is on the underdog, which in this case is Denon, to try and make working with the 90% of players out there that are Pioneer as smooth as possible.
Oh if you’re just going to sulk, don’t bother writing.
I’d like to see full read/write data exchange with Engine Prime exporting rekordbox format anywhere people wanted it. Also I think that the feature would be increasingly in demand if pioneer continue to impose real money costs on rekordbox users eg: monthly subscription. Some people will always want a freebie, and that freebie could be Engine Prime, if Engine prime, or any software for that matter, can continue to be researched and developed with it being a free product, bringing in no money exclusively. Ok, it’s easy enough to say that it’s not free, it’s included in the price of the players, but then people are also expecting lots to free stuff to be added to the players too. There has to be a point where the £200 profit made on a £1500 model is all used up after all the overheads are taken into account.
I guess we’ll never know if pioneer have a legal case hovering over inMusic for writing in rekordbox format. Inmusic won’t say, cause it would be embarrassing and probably against the terms of the legal writ anyway, and pioneer won’t say because it would make pioneer look petty and would drawn peoples attention to the not so well known fact that primes can read rekordbox, a former hurdle which Pioneer would rather more pioneer owners continued to think of as a hurdle
Rekordbox is free for music management though. You can go download it on Pioneer website right now, and export your USBs for Pioneer gear. That’s what I’m currently doing, opening both (one on each screen) and manually recreating playlists from Engine Prime inside free Rekordbox (cues loops and all) and then exporting a USB to play when I know I’m going to have to play on a Pioneer player.
I would much much rather stay entirely inside Engine Prime, however.
We keep returning to the possible issue of legality, which may be true. But it may not be, and we already have numerous examples in this thread of identical issues being overcome by other app developers. Maybe Denon should explain to us if this is really an impossibility. And if it’s not, why not go for it? Why wouldn’t we the users want this?
