What's the best backup workflow?

Legacy Products Engine PRIME
1

I have my music in iTunes and Serato, with playlists in both. and an SSD in Prime 4.

What would be the best workflow to use? for example:

Update, add and make changes to i tunes as my reference and “Base” database, then update Engine software from it into engine’s collection.

Then update Prime 4 SSD from the Engine collection and playlists?

(I can’t see a reason to use crates as i have my collection and then playlists which can be re-ordered as fashion and popularity changes. IE; most requested, Disco, Funk, Motown, Reggae, Party etc…

When backing up updating i think changes only go in one direction ???

Any help/advice gratefully received.

By the way… Prime 4 is an Awesome game changer I started doing in the 70s on Garard sp35 turntables when we had to blue tac a penny on the tone arm to stop it jumping.

2

Engine Prime doesn’t write back to the tracks tags I believe. Which is a bonus for folks that use multiple software based on the job at hand, you dont want one software trashing your tracks id.

EP stores any changes in it’s own database…so if you move around stuff in EP, no way to have iTunes reflect that.

But I may be wrong.

3

First of all, thanks for the reply. Yes I get that, you don’t want your “Base” database to be written over by anything else. So am i to take from that, that you would use I tunes as your base. then copy songs, playlists etc from I tunes to Engine Prime collection and make engine prime playlists, or just use the I Tunes load facility, in which case i don’t think it copies the actual files into Engine, just a library. Is that correct? Then when you copy to Prime 4 SSD, you are copying the files from iTunes through Engine. Not actual files residing in Engine?

4

Are you planning to switch completely to EP?

To be honest, that’s probably the easiest thing.

Because it’s more than just playlists management (thats all iTunes does)

What about bpm (you need to keep an eye on each track in EP for this) , cues, loops, beatgrids etc

What I will like is to be able to do my library management in Serato, cues, grids etc…then sync them to EP…with absolutely no changes whatsoever.

I dont use iTunes for DJ. I was using Serato exclusively for the last 10 years and did all my stuff in it.

5

Moving to Engine Prime category.

6

If you move stuff around in software a, then software b has no way of knowing where it’s tracks went. The optimal way, imho, to set up is to have a central location for all your music files. Then have software a) (for example iTunes) and your favorite DJ software b) both point to that location for their files (personally I prefer it to NOT be the standard iTunes folder, but something I have more control over). Now all you have to backup is the track folder, the iTunes folder (the media folder inside it will be empty) and the database folder of your DJ software. If you make it an incremental backup, it shouldn’t be a big backup on a daily basis. Perhaps once every month a full backup or something.

7

Not quite true. If you change any of the regular tags (like artist, title, etc.) those get written back to the track for the simple reason that they are originally taken from there.

I tested with the following:

  1. Open Tag&Rename and show contents of a folder of tracks that are in EP too
  2. Open the corresponding playlist in EP
  3. In EP, change the artist name
  4. Refresh in Tag&Rename => the changed name appears here
  5. Change the artist name back to the original in EP
  6. Refresh in Tag&Rename => original name reappears here If you change tags outside of EP, then you need to select your collection in EP and “re-import track information” for changes to appear.

If you change stuff in EP and then want to work on in iTunes, you have to do the trick with iTunes to force it to re-read tags.