No external drive for your main collection and special characters cause tracks to be corrupt

Legacy Products Engine PRIME
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TLDR:

  1. Make it clear to users that your main collection cannot be on an external drive.
  2. Special characters (–, /, /*, */) in a file name or metadata corrupt tracks in EP

So after reading some posts and MANY frustrating nights, I realized if your main music collection is on an external drive, you will have a bad time. I’ve gotten in situations where it would work for a couple of days and then things get corrupt & circular references cause engine Prime to crash. Alll understandable when you realize the software was never developed to do that or work that way but please… CAN YOU MAKE IT EXPLICITLY CLEAR YOU CANNOT HAVE YOUR MAIN COLLECTION ON AN EXTERNAL DRIVE?

Also special characters like / or – in a file name and or metadata can cause a track to be corrupt, I don’t know how much Tech debt your software has, but could you please fix this? Its a huge pain for those that have big library’s that have NO issue being loaded on your COMPETITORS platforms.

I Seriously considered returning my sc5000ms because I could not get that database to work any which way. Your Hardware is great, but if your software solution isn’t easy DJs are NOT going to bother with the trouble, I hope 2020 leads go great improvements to the ecosystem, we are patient, but we cannot take bread crumbs forever.

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My main collections are on external drives without any issues, mostly using a Samsung T5.

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I have 180 gigs of my collection on external HDD and a backup of all on another one. The 180gigs part is mostly Japanese music (so a lot of special characters). Never had a single issue, no corrupted data or tracks.

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So theres something I’m leaving out here since you guys havent had issues. I’m importing my collection from Traktor that is pointed to an external SD Card. The only way I was able to remedy my issue was to move my entire collection to my Macs internal SSD, repoint it to there in traktor , delete the Engine Prime folder on my machine and external SD Card, then reimport the entire collection into EP.

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My main collection (serato ) is located in an external drive. 4TB 70k songs

Engine Prime sees it and I can export/pack to a different usb drive from it.

Not sure why it’s not working for you.

It may be Traktor related? Does Traktor store a database on plugged in drives?

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That is certainly possible. I, too, like a number above me, have the main external collection (several even)

How is your drive with this issue formatted? Do you sync / copy between different formated drives? Do you rename your files automatically with software? If yes, I would recommend setting rules to use suitable characters.

Mac allows more characters than Windows.

NTFS does not allow the following chars: / \ : * ? " < > |

/ (forward slash) is not allowed on UNIX/Linux (therefore also not on Prime)

In Mac OS X, you cannot use the colon :. That’s it.

Should not be a problem if i’m right , but you might want to use the common - instead to be sure

Other sources:

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@mufasa not on the drive itself, only on the main computer.

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The characters that make the file corrupt are, For example: Mostly for the brazilian languge Ç ,ã,à,âá Õ,ô,òō,ó Let’s say: Armação-file with this word will be corrupted.