How To Get Serato Cue to Show up in Engine Prime - 100% Working

Legacy Products Engine PRIME
,
1

I am not impressed with the lack of clarity about how to get this done. Library migration should be the most important thing if we are going to be changing our riders. If there is no straight forward way to do this there is no way in hell anyone will migrate.

Its the one thing that’s keeping people from switching Software, not to talk about going hardware only.

Even if the Prime Series have a “make me an amazing dj button” it won’t be enough to drive the change.

So I spent last night working it out and these are my results entirely from trial and error with no guidance.

I’m a Mac user and my Serato tracks are on an external hard drive. My Serato hard drive and Music folders both have the “serato” folder.

  1. I started fresh by formatting my DENONPRIME USB device/drive in FAT32 using Disk Utility. It’s a standard hard drive by WD. 500gb and USB 2.0.

  2. I opened up Serato DJ and created new crates in Serato for the Files i want to move. eg if I already have a Crate in Serato called “hip hop bangers” , so I made a new one and gave it a name. I called it DENONPRIME HIPHOP BANGERs.

  3. I dragged all the tracks or just the ones i want to use from from the Old Serato Hip Hop Crate to the new one i just made.

  4. I did this for a few crates. HIPHOP, House, Afrobeats, Dance hall etc.

  5. I quit Serato DJ

  6. I launched the Engine Prime software.

  7. I turned off Auto analyse. This is very important. If Engine Prime auto analyse you will loose you cue points from Serato.

  8. I refreshed Serato Library in Engine. This will take a while if your Serato Library is massive. I have about 57k tracks in my Serato, both music and MP4 videos so it took close to an hour to refresh the library in Engine Prime.

  9. Make sure you wait till it completes the Reading Tag information. That’s the longest bit of the process. I just left mine to run and went to bed.

  10. Create CRATES or PLAYLIST in the Denon Prime USB (under Devices) using Engine Prime for the new Crates you made in Serato. You will see them included in your Serato Library tree in the Engine Prime. Serato Library is the 4th icon under the search box. It doesn’t have to be the same name as the ones in Serato.

  11. Now Copy the tracks from your Engine Prime Serato crates - the one you made in step 1 - to the crates/playlist on the USB you made in step 10.

  12. After the Crates are packed, DO NOT BATCH ANALYSE YOUR USB OR YOU WILL LOSE THE CUES.

  13. To check if you were successful. Double click any of the PACKED tracks, it will load in the engine Prime software to play and it will show up the hot cues. When it’s loading up the track will also be analysed.

  14. If you have the time maybe you can click each track individually and build the beatgrid. If you use the batch analysis you will loose your cues points from Serato. If track is analysed as you load it on the player, cue points remain.

  15. You can also drag files into the COLLECTION on the USB stick.

  16. Another alternative is to Make a new Crate in Serato with all your music instead of multiple crates. So make a Crate in Serato like MY ENTIRE LIBRARY or ALL MY SERATO. Then go to step 3.

  17. Dont forget you must not batch analyse nor auto analyse the library you just made on the USB.

Observations and Cons

You won’t have beat grid made, but the Engine Prime player will analyse and make them when you load up the track, or you can use the player in the software to achieve that too by just loading the track.

I will continue to explore was to fine tune the process.

4 Likes
2

Great work - Thanks for sharing this.

Some enhancements to Serato import/workflow etc may well be featured in future Engine Prime updates, but the majority, and the overall essence, of your points above remain.

3

@AIRVince given me some tips

I started afresh by uninstalling Engine Prime and deleting the Engine Prime database on my computer and formatted the hard drive again.

Whilst on the last step the analysis hanged with 3 tracks remaining. I think i found the track causing the hang. It was an MP3 file that for some reason was saved as M4A. I simply changed the file extension and just about to start the process again.

I’m going to be trying the shorter method that i just described.

I will keep yall posted

2 Likes
4

Further fine tuning of the process.

First of all i will like to give a shout out to the maker of #■■■■. He is a gent and really broke down things for me over Skype. #Denon you gotta give this gent a job he knows things. I didn’t have to buy ■■■■ to get it done too. This is 100% within Engine Prime aka EP

So basically i’ve been doing it wrong do to lack of clarity.

My main Serato library is on a Lacie Rugged 2TB thunderbolt disk formatted in HFS. When i plug the Lacie into EP it reads my Serato Library from it and EP does its thing i.e Pulling Crates and Track tags etc. Since i have auto-analyse off it doesn’t run analysis but when i double click a track, it builds waveform and i see my serato cues on EP.

Before now what i was doing wrong was to now connect a 2nd smaller hard drive that i wanted to use with my SC5000. That shows up in the USB column in EP. The first disk doesn’t show up as a connected drive due to it being either HFS or Thunderbolt or because of both, following which i then pull some tracks from the EP Serato panel view into some new crates that i made in the 2nd disk attached. The tracks go over but no cues/loops. Only tracks that were double clicked prior to exporting will have cues and loops. I don’t have time to click each track.

Luckily for me i had 2 other clones of my main serato drive on two other 4tb HDs one of which is exFAT. I made the clones with CCC which is an excellent cloner for MacOS btw.

So he advised me to use the exfat drive going forward for my djing with Serato and EP.

So i plugged the Serato exFAT into EP. Before doing this i removed the EP database in laptop user MUSIC folder and the exfat is a virgin to EP so it didn’t have EP database in its root.

So i had a fresh EP with nothing in it when i started the program again.

EP saw the exfat and it also showed on the side as a removable disk, remember my HFS formatted drive didnt show up on the side panel that lists attached disks. I closed/collapsed the removable media side panel in EP.

Refresh/Update serato library in EP

Clicked on “collection” in the EP serato panel, selected all the tracks, i then dragged it to EP Collection in the very first panel in EP. Took a few secs thats it.

Bingo! My Cues and Loops are visible on the SC5000.!!!

Happy days.

The next thing i now need to try is exporting a small set list or crate from my primed collection to a smaller USB drive to see if the cues will now move. I’m thinking of a scenario where i don’t want to plug in my main Library into the Player.

Though i see the benefit of having my entire library with me but i have over 57k tracks on it, it will be nice if i can export say 30 songs crate to small USB for a guest set at a venue or something.

20171118_225044
20171118_2250444032×2268 2.09 MB

1 Like
5

i found Mix Master G’s youtube tutorials quite helpful regarding the general workings of EP…he explains quite a bit…you might need to watch them in study mode with a pen and paper.

I have always managed my files manually in file explorer and use serato for crates, i have to consider using itunes to be flexible. Make playlists in iTunes as against my current method of doing everything inside Serato which makes cross compatibility a major pain. I know the popular dj apps all read itunes library. Its something to think about.

some links to his tutorials, think its best to just watch them all

2 Likes
6

i sync my serato library to engine library as you describe but only one create with songs 70-115 bpm dont have my hot cues and saved loops why ? :frowning: