Hello! I’ve spent too much time organizing my music through Engine Prime. I quickly realized that this software is the biggest hurdle for me to utilize Prime 4 at its best. Long story short - after organizing the beat grid & hot cues for countless songs it has decided to suddenly reanalyze my songs being loaded. I’ve used it dozens of times with my saved cues etc. and it is treating my songs as if they’re being loaded for the first time.
How is this possible? How can I prevent this from happening again? Has it happened to anyone else?
I haven’t done anything different and I’m sure you guys can understand how this can be frustrating. I’m sorry if this has been posted before. Can anyone guide me here? Thanks!
Agreed. I was hoping a week was enough time for me to organize my music for my next event, but I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to use my 5000’s for at least another couple months at this rate. Denon support is also not very quick…
I appreciate your replies. It’s unfortunate that I’ve had this post up for a week now and no one has answers for me. Imagine spending weeks organizing your music with beat grids/cues and then it decides to erase all of it and reanalyze like its a first time load. Regardless of how I feel about the software it is not even working as intended and that is what resulted in this thread.
I’ve covered all of the basics (such as ejecting properly) I just don’t want this to happen again.
Engine prime will still analyze the tracks on loading (i.e once you load a track into the player in the software) irrespective if the track has been analyzed in other software.
It only analyze once. So if you load the track once it won’t be analyzed again next time or you click reanalyze.
I think this is what is throwing you off,
The current issue is that you can’t disable this feature yet and if EP makes a muck of the analysis, you can end up with a totally new BPM and beatgrid for a song in EP
For now I will advise that you continue your core library management in Traktor if the import to EP works fine.
Engine prime is being worked on I believe and who knows what may change in the code down the line. I have been here since day 1 and I remember when an update rendered ones database incompatible with the update. I’m not saying this will happen again but the likelihood of Traktor/Serato/Rekordbox making a change that will require library rebuild is lower than that of EP.
@mufasa I appreciate you looking to help. I believe you’re somewhat on the right track however it doesn’t necessarily apply to my situation. These songs have already been loaded into Engine Prime & the P4 multiple times. After about two weeks of going back and forth between the P4 and my PC they were suddenly reanalyzed in P4. I didn’t change anything in my routine. The only change I make is add music to my drive without changing directories or anything of that sort.
I understand your frustration as an early adopter myself. Been in this boat and eagerly waiting for a half decent user experience. That’s one of the reasons I held up doing any library management in Engine prime.
When things go south, sometimes it’s more time saving to start afresh. My recommendation is that you still do all your library management in any of the supported third party software and simply use Engine Prime as a mule for getting tunes into your Prime 4.
The number of times I have deleted my database is uncountable.
I just sync everything over again, all my Crates, cues, cue labels and loops done in Serato are transferred again.
You may want to consider this as a back up for every worst case scenario.
The only thing that you will lose is time and engine primes analysis, and if I were you I won’t even do any analysis in Engine prime since your prime4 can use bpm data stored in tags with the latest firmware. Engine prime is still pants with bpm analysis as you know
I even go one stage further, as I was an early adopter of Serato (Itch as it was), before it unified with the DVS to become DJ. I lost loads of libraries/crates/folders/structures, whatever you want to call them, so used iTunes as my backend. It is clunky, can be unfriendly, if it is rock solid in the folder structures and has never let me down. I just simply import into whatever DJ software I’m using.
Is there any official word from Denon about these issues? We are offering free beta testing for them for their software, because clearly it was not done prior to release. I’m saying this in an honest manner, will they respond about these issues? I’ve only put about 12 hours on mine and had to re make my library 3 times.
Can only advise that you use iTunes as main library management.
That way you can delete the EP database at any time and import all over… And only lose time… (And works with every piece of software.)
EP is not good enough as it is yet - hopefully the new 20-22 man strong development team in NZ is creating better results than ever before with future updates.
But yes, stability lacks and feature-improvement is needed.
I know it’s in works getting fix.denon is definitely getting all our feed back an sending it to there dev team. I think we will see a fix soon. trust me I know is very frustrating I had to do my whole liberty over. it’s not kool or fun
I’ll take it that’s just a wild guess or an opinion of your, rather than something you could provide evidence of. Opinions are always perfectly fine, except when they’re pushed out as facts instead.
Library management is not really my problem. I have my music organized in specific folders and then use Traktor to analyze my songs.
@djbertie ‘free beta testing’ is an accurate way of putting it sadly.
I’m aware of the team working on Engine Prime. However, there is no communication or something like a roadmap on when updates will happen. All I am seeing is ‘request it and if it will get enough likes it may get added.’ That is not going to work for me when I’ve spent $2,000 and very basic features are missing. I don’t mind changing my workflow and starting over with Engine Prime but as I said the software is not even working as intended.
@drmtc the cause/solution might be closer if you can answer the next questions:
Is it on every track?
How big is your collection? How big are the database files in the Engine folder on your drive? What drive you’re using and how is it formatted (Fat32/exFAT)? Did you always eject the drive on desktop and on player?
@drmtc I thought maybe a large database on FAT32 could be the problem, but that is certainly not the case here. FAT32 can handle files of up to 4GB and the EP database can grow larger with large collections.
As far as I know, the journal files should only exist when Engine Prime is open. if these files remain on the drive when Engine Prime is closed, this may be a way to the problem. Of course I don’t see if Engine Prime was open when you took this screenshot. If Engine Prime was open and the journal files disappear when Engine Prime is closed then I would not have an answer immediately and I would contact support directly to get this sorted.
In addition, you may want to make a regular manual backup of your database folder (zip it or copy it to another named folder). Should not be necessary of course, but it can save a lot of work.
