As a mobile DJ, I have to entertain many different kinds of audiences—everything from nightclubs to corporate events to kids’ birthday parties. As such, I’ve got music libraries for each broad category of event. One of the biggest differences between libraries is whether they include any explicit tracks or not. You may not believe it, but some people still get upset if you unexpectedly blast profanity over the PA at their wedding reception.
In the past when using other DJ controllers, I would sort my collection of tracks into different folders, then only load the folder that was needed for the specific event. That way, I could search through the tracks with confidence that I wouldn’t accidentally play the explicit version of a song when I wanted the clean one (or vice versa—an almost equally embarrassing situation).
However, I have not figured out how to efficiently employ this approach with the Prime 4. Search is global across crates and playlists, so I cannot simply manage the separate music collections using those features. Similarly, there is no method to tag individual tracks as explicit and then filter them via global search. The best approach I have thought of is to use separate USB drives for each music collection, but that seems cumbersome to maintain.
I know others in this forum have requested the ability to confine search queries to a single crate or playlist. Having that ability would absolutely solve this problem (as well as a few others) and I wholeheartedly encourage Denon to develop it as quickly as possible. As an alternative, adding the option to tag tracks as “explicit” and then sort/search/filter seems like a straightforward solution that many other software packages have taken.
Keep up the good work and thanks for your continued support of the DJ community!
I’m not aware of any DJ software or music management that currently offers this feature, and I’m unaware of any dedicated meta tag info on tracks today that consistently support the notation of Explicit vs. Clean.
Just like you, I play many different events. What I’ve done is labeled my songs either CLEAN or DIRTY in the title field (i.e. Snoop Dogg - Gin & Juice [Clean]). You’ll find that most digital record pools are doing the same with their tracks. Also streaming services like Tidal does something similar where if a track is dirty they place the word EXPLICIT in the song title.
Additionally, I place my music into Crates (Serato/Engine Prime) to make sure I have a selection of music that’s playable for certain crowds/events.
Another option would be to use the Genre field to identify your tracks.
For example: So that I can easily filter down to find my different genres of House Music, some of my Genres are:
HOUSE/DEEP/VOCAL
HOUSE/DEEP/DUB
HOUSE/CLASSIC/VOCAL
HOUSE/CLASSIC/DUB
HOUSE/ACAPELLA
HOUSE/TECH/VOCAL
As you can see, I am very anal with my music. This is just some food for thought.
One thing you might be able to do in the interim is to make use of one of the tag fields you might not be using. Not sure what the capabilities of search filters are on the P4 off the top of my head but I was thinking if you used the comment field or composer field etc.
Maybe when smart crates is implemented, then you can set it up.
I use various dj pools, some pools tag in the grouping column if it’s clean or dirty
So I can easily do a smart crate in serato eg top 40 + newer than 2015 + clean
That can also be a temporary workaround for you.
Make the clean crates in serato, copy the contents to a normal crate in serato (as Engine prime can’t read serato smart crates), then sync that over to your engine prime
Serato preparation mode is free, no licence required
Rekordbox has intelligent playlists as well and I think that one is readable by Engine prime.
It boils down to the prep work, ensure your tags are correct for easy searching.
That definately would be helpful. Personally, I prefer playing clean versions of tracks. I sent feature request to Tidal for this. In fact, just this Sunday I was playing one of Tidal’s Mother’s Day playlist and was embarrassed when one of the tracks went off on a f-bomb tangent. Luckily the crowd was some close friends and their mother was the master of the f-bomb.
