My thoughts on the SC5000M's 2 months in! Short Review and Requests

MixMan · January 7, 2019, 2:44pm

Hello hello, First time posting to the Denon DJ Forum! Hello everybody!

Quick Review:

So I am two months into owning 2X SC5000m players and overall the experience is amazing!

I was a vinyl DJ for years, Made the move to Serato scratch after not really enjoying the CDJ experience, then went to Traktor for a bit, then back to Serato and now I’ve gone Prime. Basically I’ve tried everything out there and the SC5000m’s have finally allowed me to keep that Vinyl experience while enjoying all the mod cons of using something like Traktor or Serato DJ. I really am loving them, hats off to Denon for coming out with an amazing product, and really sticking it to pioneer in terms of affordability and forward thinking.

However two months in and there are a few things that I think if tweaked would just take this player to the next level.

1. Comments… tags… metadata… call it what you like.

I’m not the first to ask for it and I don’t think I’ll be the last but we really need some way of tagging tracks. I have a huge collection of electronic music and I love to tag tracks up to help remind me what they sound like or what it is I like to use em for… e.g. “heavy” “syncopated” “late night” “mid” “intro” “must play” etc.

I’m crap with track names and artist names and without tags it can sometimes be a bit of guesswork loading up tracks. (I know you can see metadata by touching the track name for a second in the list but thats not fast or good enough for browsing in the heat of the moment, it needs to be on the screen with the track names etc)

Suggestion: Maybe when a crate is selected the crates menu could fold to the left to free up some screen real-estate for displaying comments and track meta data. That would be amazing… and of course it would be amazing if these comments/tags could be added to from the player… oh and searchable!!

I just found a track that contains a classical sample I love, and rather than have to make a mental note of it, I wish I could just add a tag “classical sample” and forget about it. That would make it much easier for finding in the future.

2. Auto Analysis on a new drive…

Now maybe I’m missing something but I have looked and couldn’t seem to find a solution to this. A friend came over and plugged in her drive with a batch of un-analysed tracks and the only way of analysing them was to load them one by one…

Maybe it’s too CPU intensive… but isn’t there a way of analysing a drive or folder’s worth of tunes in one go?

3. Just a bit glitchy still…

Sometime’s when I load a track, even though its analysed, It will play and I’ll get a moment of no audio, or the screen will stick for a moment or some glitchy behaviours when jumping around the timeline of a freshly loaded track. Its not the end of the world and I can live with it, but it feels like a slight improvement, stability wise could be made.

4. Prepping a drive with Prime.

Again maybe I’m overlooking something here so please let me know if theres a way around this. I loaded up a drive using the prime software. Later that night found myself getting asked to play at a party with a pre-supplied traktor controller. Nice one… thankfully I had my drive on me!

Only thing was all the tracks were saved on the drive Artist>Album>Track. There are a lot of artists from whom I only have one track which made navigating that drive a bit of a nightmare. It would be nice if you could get engine prime software to write tracks to the drive in playlist folders or even by genre… (I appreciate though that may cause doubles).

For now I think I’ll just drag and drop the tracks onto a drive in folders of my choosing and analyse them in prime (player or laptop) afterwards.

Lastly… Prime to Rekordbox…

Ok so this one isn’t even aimed at Denon as much as its just a wish of mine. Its awesome that there’s software to convert rekordbox to prime, and that Denon have even gone some lengths to make this happen on the player itself but I think the real issue is the other way around. Sure its nice that people moving from rekordbox to prime can bring over there loops cues etc… but I think more people would be enticed to go prime if there was a way of turning prime prepared tracks into rekordbox readable files. As its more likely that a Prime user will find themselves having to conform to a CDJ setup in a club etc than the other way around. Anyway if anyone is listening and has the know-how or inclination to make that happen, theres one guy over here who would very much appreciate it!

OK so thats it, maybe a bit longwinded but I think its good to provide as much insight as possible into these things! Maybe I’ve missed some things along the way and look forward to getting put right!

Comment’s aside… I’m glad I switched to prime!

Cheers n have at it!

mattpositive · January 7, 2019, 3:35pm

[quote=“MixMan, post:1, topic:11885”] (I know you can see metadata by touching the track name…it needs to be on the screen with the track names etc)…Suggestion: Maybe when a crate is selected the crates menu could fold to the left to free up some screen real-estate for displaying comments and track meta data. That would be amazing…[/quote]

I concur. I also wanted to add that one of many advantages of coming from a Pioneer/CDJ style screen of the Nexus2s to that of the sc5000’s is the little thrill I experience each time the Denon screen appears - it just looks so great. But I do agree with @MixMan that even better use of the ample screen’s real estate, particularly in regards to displaying more expanded track information (and track info searchability via tags or comments, etc) .

mufasa · January 7, 2019, 8:14pm

I’m the same as well. Comments are my saving grace in Serato.

garrapeta · January 8, 2019, 1:44am

Yep, we need better library management. To me search by comment, year or record label is a must.

Pillola · January 8, 2019, 3:30pm

Hi @MixMan i really agree with you… I am very satisfied about my SC5000 and x1800, them are a true pleasure to use… with some “but” :

…the lack of search by “Comments… tags… metadata…” (and tag on the fly…) is a big issue for me and for many other people, and quite a shame for that multicore cpu inside the SC heart … and sound to me easy to implement … comment’s are very important for my workflow and very useful to handle a big music library.

Other minor issues that i found:

some little glitch using the beatjump
the lost of the selected pitch range if you are using more than one layer frequently
occasionally some second of freeze of the screen (without sound interruption)

All these issues should be easily solved with a future Firmware and, now that the NAMM is very close, i hope it will be the right time for DENON to release it!!!

Regarding the " Prepping a drive with Prime." it seems the the DJ CONVERTION UTILITY by ATGR to work right… converting almost all library in all format… and it will be revolutionary (i don’t know if it would be legal) if Prime Engine, as a preparation software, implement the capability to convert his library to all main standard format as PIONEER SERATO TRAKTOR ecc

C’mon DENON You gave us the best player and one of the best mixer in the market… now you have just to unleash the power of this awesome set up!!! …WITH LOVE …

D

tellor01 · January 8, 2019, 4:42pm

100 agree with this ! I really hope denon can improve the pitch increment

Djscottyb · January 9, 2019, 1:01am

Yes! Beatjump does glitch sometimes. Sometimes it’s seamless and other times not. Does seem to struggle more with longer jumps though. 8 and 16 beats doesn’t seem to trip it up as much as 32 and 64. So some optimization there should definitely fix it up I would think. I’m sure there are tons of under the hood improvements coming with the next firmware update!

StereoHead · January 9, 2019, 12:43pm

i have requested this too. definitely something that would be very useful when the deck is idle and you have a load of tracks that need analysing

Reese · January 9, 2019, 1:00pm

I didn’t reply to the other topic, but I will do here.

Analysis on deck is for the rare occasion you haven’t prepared with a laptop or someone comes to you with a foreign drive.

Analysis takes up to a minute per track depending how long the song is. A normal laptop does this within seconds. A deck is just not that powerful.

So. If somebody comes up with a 1000 track drive for instance, even in idle time it takes the better part of the day…

Not to be blunt, but it’s a bad request IMHO.

Alternative way I could think of is to select a few tracks and then press analyze. Or offloading the analysis to a connected laptop, tablet or smartphone via network or usb. Both options are not possible yet, but would keep the stress on a deck way way less.

Reese · January 9, 2019, 4:52pm

I get what you’re saying, but I guess you would want a music download store on the device also?

The onboard Prime processor is no match for a simple Intel i5 processor to analyze tracks. The only time I use Engine Prime is to analyze tracks and to put them in a collection/crate. All the rest should/could be done on the SC. “Nearly completely stand-alone”.

Djscottyb · January 10, 2019, 3:55am

Reese, would you happen to know exactly what multi-core processor is in an sc5000? Has anyone done a tear-down to confirm?

Reese · January 10, 2019, 9:03am

Nope, but have fun: https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/Y4O-JP07

cities_in_elsewhere · January 10, 2019, 9:39am

i agree with the meta data, i can see it being extremely useful for a lot of users. Personally for me, it would be helpful just to be able to see ratings, and be able to rate a track on on the fly. That way i can at least see my favorites as i scroll through crates. That and being able to create a playlist on the players, or at least have an option for the prep list to not remove tracks after they have been played, having to use my pc for that kind of thing is bothersome.

StereoHead · January 10, 2019, 10:53am

Completely agree. The user journey is a mess in Engine prime.
Why on earth would i want to see duplicate track entries for my main collection and whats on my USB? makes no sense at all.

MixMan · January 10, 2019, 12:50pm

fair enough… put like that it makes sense…, best bet would be to have a laptop handy and just run a quick analysis on the drive then!

Cheers

Djscottyb · January 10, 2019, 2:44pm

Yeah a whole lotta nothing there! lol. I ask because I had heard in a video they had core i5 chips in them which while surprising I wouldn’t totally rule out. I had figured it was an atom chip of some kind but these are not battery powered devices so that efficiency isn’t required. Maybe an AMD chip too. I feel like it’s most likely a triple or quad core chip. I think they wanted these machine to be powerful enough to handle future updates and things they still wanted to add down the road. I really do think NAMM will hold some really good things these machines!

MixMan · January 10, 2019, 4:19pm

Thinking about it, the pitch resolution hasn’t bothered me that much, but it’s true it does drift a little quickly.

I think with the next update if Denon can do the following, many people would be very happy!

Comments/tagging/metadata.
Improve the high end (hasn’t really bothered me, but it certainly has been a contentious issue)
Improve Pitch Resolution (even 0.02%)

Bonus features that would be sweet:

Create and manage playlists from the Deck
Manually adjust beat grids on the deck!

Take care of all of the above and Denon will have knocked it out the park!!!

Reese · January 10, 2019, 4:50pm

Yes that’s because US government is in lockdown. So FCC is also.

It is no Intel or AMD. Less powerful than normal computers.

Djscottyb · January 10, 2019, 5:57pm

But we don’t know what’s inside!

And of course it’s less powerful than what’s in a computer because it doesn’t need to be.

Intel and AMD have LOTS of variants of their chips.

Djscottyb · January 10, 2019, 6:06pm

Ok, getting this thread back on track! haha

Also I DO wish for the ability to change font size on our displays! I would love to be able to see more listings at once. Would be super helpful! And I echo the wishes for more search options!