Hi, I’ve just bought a Prime Go and although the hardware seems great, I am now realising the shortcomings of the Engine Prime software for managing my music library.
I know it’s possible to browse/import an iTunes library through the iTunes Music Library.xml file, but I don’t use iTunes. I use MusicBee instead, and i’ve got a well tagged aand organised library that i’ve refined over many years. l am interested in hearing how people manage their music libraries and get music into EP without using iTunes in their workflows?
Questions I have include:
- How to leverage the extended tagging capabilities of Musicbee when tag support is much more limited in the DJ software. i.e. do you use Musicbee to filter/sort/find tracks and create playlists or crates, and then import into Engine Prime?
- How do you get your playlists or collections of music into your EP?
- How can I maintain a subset of my main music library for DJ use but only use Musicbee for tagging and creating playlists or crates?
- Do the music files need to be stored on the same drive as the Engine Prime installation?
- Is is possible to update metadata through Musicbee and reimport into the DJ software in a relatively painless way? Or is this a concept that should be avoided?
- How do you manage multiple genres as most(?) DJ SW does not support this
- How do you minimise the risk of the DJ software overwriting your metadata if your DJ tracks are part of your main music collection?
Really hoping some of you have some tips because currently i’m stuck!
Updates
Q2. I have been able to use the ‘Export the library as an iTunes formatted xml file’ in MusicBee to enable Engine Prime to browse this library and from there add tracks to the EP collection. However…I can only get this to work on a small library. On my main library of 18k tracks the import fails. It looks like there might be some differences between the MusicBee and official iTunes xml, or EP does not have graceful error handling for the xml syntax. Interestingly the ratings stored in the ID3 POPM tag are imported by this method whereas they are not when dropping directly from Windown explorer into Engine Prime.
Q4. Using the method above, files on a USB drive have been successfully added to the library and they are correctly labeled in the EP library pane (i.e. the track list) as being on my ‘G:’ drive.