I wanted to share this story with those of you who might come from a similar DJing background or have experienced similar issues since switching from whatever to Prime. And hope you JRR fans appreciate the title 
I came in as a long-time vinyl and Traktor DJ using a pair of D2 controllers with a Denon DN-X1600 mixer and a laptop. This setup, while involving lots of devices, cables, and of course the dreaded laptop, was rock solid in that it was ultra reliable and matched my DJ style quite well. This involved a portable drive with a huge music library, playing tracks on the fly without any planned setlist, and analyzing folders or files on hard drives while DJing so I could see BPMās and other metadata quickly and so friends could jump on with their drives and play their tracks easily, too. But like most techy people, I eventually wanted to try something new and at that time the Prime 4 had just been announced. The true standalone functionality, built-in hard drive bay and huge touchscreen all won me over, so I decided to switch.
I was one of the first P4 buyers and waited through that excruciating preorder phase, stupidly selling off all my DJ gear beforehand (minus my Technics of course, which will follow me to the grave 
) When I finally received it and started using it, I was amazed at how well engineered it was, and even felt Engine Prime was not a bad app to replace Traktor. But pretty soon, I realized that in standalone mode it just couldnāt do the things I was accustomed to with my Traktor rig. Such as batch analyzing on the fly while DJing (possible with a laptop running Engine Prime, but that defeats the purpose of why I bought the P4), auto-analyzing new files on an external drive, and not requiring your music to be part of a massive database first in order to see metadata. I also found the BPM detection to be worse than Traktorās, and there wasnāt granular beat gridding capability (which has since been added with the 1.6 firmware, thankfully). To make matters worse, my P4 had the ādeck locking upā issue, which literally killed my first live DJ set with it at an electronic music festival, and I then spent over a year trying to get the unit fixed or replaced. Iām still waiting for the replacement unit as I type this - at least itās on the way finally, but Colorado weather has held it up indefinitely 
All that said, while I tried hard not to compare Traktor to Prime and just move forward with this new style of DJing on the P4, in the end, I made the difficult decision to go back to Traktor. FWIW, Iām planning on keeping my replacement Prime 4 because I canāt deny how full featured it is, especially with the wireless capability and online integrations. And, it looks badass, which is great for live performances (IMO). But for my home studio I just had to go back to what was most comfortable and reliable, and therefore what I would utilize the most. Towards the end of my Prime journey, the Prime 4 was barely used as I was too apprehensive about it crapping out 30 minutes into a live recording. While I may be giving up some of the latest DJ technology and online integrations with this switch, at least I will have something I know will work and meshes better with my style of DJing, and in the end, thatās really all that matters.
The reason Iām posting this epic of a story is because I feel there are a lot of other DJs like me in this forum that experienced similar hardware problems and/or growing pains with Prime. Iām not here to try to convince anyone to ditch it or to advocate for any other platform, only to say that I understand your dilemma, and itās possible that itās not the right device or platform for YOU. Regardless, all the best to all you digital DJs out there no matter which platform you prefer!
