I recently reinstalled my machine and my music is in a different location. Needless to say, the EP software wasn’t pleased. After manually writing SQL queries all day to fix things, I decided to dedicate a few days to writing a quick and dirty tool to help me get stuff back in working order. I figured I’d share it with everyone else, in case it’s useful.
Here’s the deal: I wrote this for myself and my specific needs. If it works for you, I’m happy. If it doesn’t, I’m sorry, there’s not much I can do. Denon should be the primary source for software updates and features, not users. This is just simply a workaround tool made for me by me. I could have kept it all to myself but figured there’s no harm in open sourcing it in the off chance it works for anyone else.
The code is open sourced on GitHub, so you can browse the code or compile it yourself if you (rightfully so) don’t trust binary links on the internet. The tool is designed to work with your PC’s EP databases and external drives, I have not tested it with other situations such as networked drives, other computers, etc. Feel free to contribute code, I’ll review any pull requests.
This does not work with iTunes, Serato, Traktor, or any other tool where you created things. It only works with data entirely made within Engine Prime or the turntables running Engine OS. Sorry, that’s just my use case. If you really need that, another user has a tool that should work, although there’s a charge for it.
Here’s the features:
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Import/export the entire EP database either from your PC to an external drive, including all the music and allowing you to define path remappings, including your playlists, crates, 100% everything exported. You can also import all your data from an external drive. Note that importing does NOT copy music FROM an external drive, just the database entries. But it WILL let you remap the paths where these files are found on your PC. This is useful if you made a bunch of changes either on your PC or your thumb drive and you just want to wholesale mirror the data to be fully synced up.
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Import/export playlists. This lets you copy playlist to/from your PC to an external drive. I guess you could also drag and drop w/in EP for similar behavior but I personally ran into some issues with this.
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Same as above but just for crates
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Import/export metadata, with the option to only import/export cues, loops, both cues and loops, or everything (which includes waveform and beat grid data).
If you use this, you should back your files up first. That means your entire thumb drive, and on your pc, the m.db and p.db files Engine Prime creates in your default music folder. Also, once again, like I said, I wrote this for myself and my setup/usage cases. So I can’t promise it’ll work for everyone. But it doesn’t cost me anything to leave it open source and let anyone try their luck at using it.
If you run into problems, then this tool sadly probably isn’t meant for your particular set up. I can’t possibly test every situation, and again, I wrote this for my needs and decided to share it w/ others that have my same set up.
The app should have a fair amount of details on what is going on and what it wants you to do. I tried to make it as idiot proof as possible by verifying paths and stuff, but still, back your stuff up.
You could probably use this to move your db from one computer to another by doing an export from one machine to a thumb drive and then an import from that thumb drive to the new machine, but I haven’t tested this.
Here’s the main GitHub page. Please read the home page. It has very detailed usage instructions and important information: https://github.com/Architekt909/EnginePrimeSync
Here’s the link to the Windows release: https://github.com/Architekt909/EnginePrimeSync/releases
Download “Engine Prime Sync 1.0.zip” and extract it anywhere, doesn’t matter. Run the only .exe file in there. On my edition of Windows it did a 10 second virus scan before it let me run it. You may encounter similar virus scans.
If you run into issues/bugs, do not report them here. I will not be checking back in this thread, as in my experience, internet forums are a horrible place to be. As documented in the FAQ on the GitHub link I posted, please use the GitHub issue tracker to report any bugs
Final note: I’m done working on this tool. It does everything I need it to do for my use cases. I also just don’t have the free time to spend working on it anymore. If there’s some glaring bugs that people have reported via GitHub issue tracker, I will look into them, but otherwise, this is it. It’ll either work for you, or it won’t.
Mac users: In theory it should run on a mac, if someone were to compile the code for it. It’s written in .Net 5.0 Standard so it should in theory be able to run on any OS. I just am not familiar enough w/ Macs to do this, nor do I use EP on the Mac I have.