I just got my Denon Prime 4 last week. I am used to organizing my music on Rekordbox. I downloaded some tracks the other day and combined that particular genre with my Rekordbox imported tracks to make a crate on Engine Prime. I transferred that crate to a flash drive. I’ve been mixing from that flash drive for a couple days now without updating it. Today I wanted to grid and hot cue the entire crate. I did it on my computer.
187 tracks I adjusted the grids and added 8 hot cues for each track, yes 8 hot cues for every track. It took me 12 hours working nonstop. I went to update my flash drive with the new data so I could improve my mixing so I tried dragging the crate from my collection into the flash drive on Engine Prime into the old Crate on my playlist, and it made duplicates. So I deleted the crate in my flash drive and copied it over again. I plug it into the Prime 4 and see no hot cues. Hmm.
So I try again, and this time I hit the sync button on the external section of Engine Prime. I figured that makes sense. I put the flash drive back in the Prime 4. Still no hot cues. Then I go to look at my crate in Engine Prime and notice none of the tracks have the hot cues that I just put on. Actually a few random ones do and I cannot even hypothesize why those ones in particular do. 95% of my work is gone, and I can’t seem to figure out why? Did the old flash drive data actually update the data that I just entered into Engine Prime? If so, why would an older set of data have the capability of replacing newer data? Is the data completely lost? The tracks that still have the cue points are duplicates in the Collection folder. Also I must note I still have not closed Engine Prime since starting this 12 hour cueing session. I didn’t even imagine that could possibly be an issue. Never had anything remotely similar happen with Rekordbox, Traktor, or Serato and I’ve been using them for 5 years.
Please, I want someone to tell me there’s a way to recover this data or I might lose my mind. Or if that’s not possible, explain what in particular I did to mess this up so I don’t do it again? My actions were intuitive yet this is a nightmarish scenario. It should not be possible to easily mess your data up this badly. I don’t want to hate my setup because of this software, I love the controller so much, but this might be the stupidest technology problem I’ve ever had.
Yet to come across duplicates issue at my end, Engine prime should not make duplicates. Say I transfer a crate from EP containing 10 tracks to a flash drive.
Then I add 5 more new tracks to same crate on Ep, when I drag that crate to my flash drive , the 5 tracks are added.
But I will lose any data I may have set on those 10 tracks when using the players . Engine prime will revert to the main collection data status.
You lost your hot cues at this point.
Probably hot cues you set whilst mixing on the players or ones transferred from other dj software
Going forward, use the Sync Manager to manage your information.
But I’m not aware of any way to automatically spot and add new information in either direction. ie bidirectional sync using most recent changes automatically
You have to do it manually
Once you start sync manager,
Sync changes from USB stick to EP Collection (if your most recent changes were made on the hardware),
or
From Collection to USB (this is what you should have done)
Maybe you can start a feature request for An option for Intelligent Bidirectional Sync Manager that uses the most recent information to keep user data such as hot cues, grids etc up to date
Thank you for the help! I’m a very hands on learner and couldn’t fathom how I could be punished this harshly for clicking the incorrect button once. I will stay away from that sync button because I like to do cue points on the computer and will research more into the software.
I may have duplicates because I tried seeing if my cue points from rekordbox would transfer over by importing them (they didnt), and my music collection is a bit fragmented because my laptop was recently destroyed and I just built a PC to replace it. I put my most recent rekordbox’d flash drive into the PC to transfer so that it had my rekordbox data from my laptop, but there may be some duplicates because of aggregating libraries between multiple between sources, I had all of my music on an external hard drive that I created a folder for on the homescreen of my PC that I imported and also those copies are being shared from rekordbox so that’s probably it.
But, some of these tracks do have all 8 cue points that I set, and I definitely did not do that on my controller, so I still don’t know how that’s possible.
Deleted hot cues was a known issue in engine a few versions back. Make sure you are on the current version as the problem was fixed. If you are on the current version then I’m not sure of what the issue is.
