Preparing to play a club gig with Pioneer system - doomed?

Hi guys, new here! :slight_smile: I’ve been thinking to get Prime 2 to replace my ddj-400 controller. My only concern is what will happen if I play a gig with Pioneers and want to prepare the tracks and the set with my Denon. Will it work if I analyze tracks, set cues etc on Denon, export a playlist to a USB stick and start playing at a club from that USB stick?

Just use Rekordcloud to create a rekordbox compatible usb stick

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Ore use rekordbox to create a FAT32 USB stick, and use that USB stick in Denon Prime → be aware however that with very big libraries p.db will outgrow 4GB, giving you an error…

Other possibility is to take your Prime 2 with you. I’ve decided that swapping CDJ-2000’s for my own SC6000 isn’t a bigger problem than connecting my whole Traktor setup to the CDJ-2000’s, so I went for it…

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Thanks Nitebeatz and Johan!

So basically if I first create a USB stick with Rekordbox, plug that in to a Denon Prime and export playlists etc to that USB stick, all should work well in Pioneers like CDJ-2000 or RX2 etc?

You create a rekordbox USB stick, and when you put that USB stick into a Denon unit (SC6000, Prime 2, Prime 4, whatever), Engine OS will convert the rekordbox database and put a Engine Library on that USB stick alongside your Rekordbox library on the stick.

I haven’t used it myself yet, but I heard that the Engine Library file will update itself from updates you make to the USB stick using rekordbox, but not the other way around: changes in the Engine Library (cue points you’ll set on Denon) don’t go back to Rekordbox.

I don’t know what the Denon desktop software will do with your rekordbox USB stick, although Denon Prime (desktop) is able to read and import the rekordbox library on your computer. So using the desktop software you can actually make 2 USB sticks. Engine Prime won’t be able to write to Rekordbox though…

Last but not least, there are a myriad of third-party tools to convert Rekordbox to Engine and vice versa, although, most tools also can not to write to rekordbox directly, so you’ll at least be left with a lengthy XML import into rekordbox. I would also advise to keep Rekordbox as your main library in this use case…

It’s a bit of experimenting to see what works best for you. You can already download Engine Prime without committing to Denon yet. Or try your favorite Rekordbox USB in the store on a Denon unit… But in the end, yes, Pioneer and Denon are 2 separate eco-systems, so sacrifices have to be made…

This XML import is the worst thing (to Rekordbox).

Would have thought the conversion folks would have found a way to bypass this.

At one point i tried to convert my serato library to rekordbox…3 days… deep still importing from rekordbox xml.

The criminal thing about it is that Rekordbox uses the same SQL database system as Denon (off course with it’s own structure), but encrypts it, so the computer-savvy user can’t hack it… On top of that, there has been a version of Rekordbox 6 where you couldn’t even export your database: so once you imported your stuff in Rekordbox you would never get it out. Luckily there has been so much resistance against this that you can again export your database to XML. But the encryption is still in place…

Denon doesn’t encrypt. Offcourse it isn’t supported by Denon, but if I want to write tools to convert Denon to or from other formats, It’s a free country! Kudo’s to Denon!

I have SC5000’s at home and normally play out on pioneer.

So I manage my library with rekordbox and then use the Denon conversion utility made by ATGR which makes Denon compatible USB’s with all the beatgridding etc. They also make a utility to sync any changes you’ve made on the denons back to rekordbox.

In reality this means I maintain a hard drive for Denon home use and I also have rekordbox sticks for playing out, it is possible to make sticks that cater for both but I had an SSD lying about so just made this exclusively for Denon use, however all the cue points, tagging, beat grids are done by rekordbox so it’s all the same regardless which products im playing on

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But that tool from ATGR still involves an XML import to sync back to rekordbox, or not?

I haven’t done it back to rekordbox so I’m not sure how it works.

But rekordbox to Denon you have to export the rekordbox xml yeah.