Hi all,
I’m finding the lack of automatic refresh of music library based on my disc folder structure very frustrating after years of simply clicking a “refresh” button in the software I used previously (Ots AV).
I’m primarily a wedding DJ and have approx 30,000 tracks organised in a way that makes sense to me on disc. I’ve top level folders such as “60s”, “70s”, “80s”, “Pop”, “Dance” and within these I sub-organise (e.g. under “Dance” I’ll have “Commercial”, “Trance”, etc).
When I get new music I add it to my master device (a NAS). Sometimes I’d find an issue with a track I already had and download a new copy replacing the existing file, or I’d find a typo in a name and correct it (effectively a deletion and addition). All this happened on my master copy.
I then used to simply sync my laptop and backup laptop with that master copy, hit refresh in the software on each, and everything was current. It took minutes before each gig to ensure I was ready to go with the latest copy of everything.
Now that I’ve bought a P4 I’m struggling with this. I’m still making updates as I need to through each week to my master music library and I can sync the updates to my laptop and to the P4’s internal SSD without issue. However, in EP, as you’ll be aware, when you set up a crate it doesn’t ever look back to the original folder the files were loaded to the crate from to check for updates. This is incredibly frustrating as I’ve needed to manually make a note of every change I made on my master copy (there could be a handful or there could be 100s in a week) and then manually update the crates accordingly which is taking a lot more effort than I’m used to, and is very time consuming!
Am I missing something (i.e. is there a better way)? How do other people manage with the EP software in its current state in this area?
OK, thanks, I have never used Serato and therefore don’t have a license. I assume I’d need one to be able to do this?
My previous software was OtsAV which is really solid and reliable but quite basic (though allows video for karaoke/MP4 tracks) but doesn’t seem to be widely used and therefore EP doesn’t have an import from OtsAV option!
@mufasa Sorry to reply by editing an old post, I’ve got into a bit of a pickle on the forum and it won’t let me reply below (I get “please wait for other users to participate before replying”!).
Anyway, I tried all of this and it worked for the first pass (though took a long time on a subset of my library I used as a test - not an issue if that’s just a one-off.) However it seems the issue has just moved from EP to Serato…again unless I’m missing something. As far as I can see Serato also is missing the ability to auto-refresh crates based on changes to a folder on disc, but I can’t believe that with Serato having been around a while now, so it’s probably me. I played with Smart Crates in Serato but there’s no “lives in Windows folder X” type option. So right now I have the exact issue in Serato that I started out with in EP! Can you advise?
Serato Offline Player is free, Just for library management. You only need a license if you need to plug in a controller or dj hardware to it. It can handle videos, karaoke etc files.
You are correct. Serato does not have this feature you seek. I do everything manually in Serato, personal preference.
I really hope Denon does something about this. My dog, they have a sync feature. Why can’t they just include another column to sync between iTunes, and the iTunes imported crate and / or playlist? It just doesn’t make sense. As professional DJ’s, we have substantially sized music libraries. Does Denon expect that we’re going to have to reimport and reanalyze our iTunes library into Engine Prime every time we purchase or import new music into iTunes? Ridiculous IMHO. This really sux! Seriously, this may have been a prevented me from purchasing the P4 if I knew this in advance.