Apple Music to SERATO sync - Lost all Beat Grids and Keys!

Lexicon Questions & Help
1

I just synced my whole iTunes Library within Serato and now ALL of the BPM and KEY assignements (and beat grids) are GONE!

They were all beautifully (and laborsouly) beat-gridded and now whenever I load a track in Serato (after having LEXCION analyze and beatmap and overwrite my SERATO crates (which is what I wanted, use Lexcion as the main hub)

But it hasn’t transferred any of the bpms/keys or beatgrids. Only the Cue points

What am I overlooking? Can someone one shed some light on this?

Thank you in advance

2

It sounds like you imported from iTunes into Lexicon? That gives you your playlists from iTunes but not BPM and Key because iTunes doesn’t know what those are. Your beatgrids, BPM and Key (also cues) live in Serato so to get those into Lexicon, you have to import from Serato.

There is a safeguard built into Lexicon when you sync to Serato in this exact situation regarding cues (this happened before), because you don’t want to lose all your cues normally. But for beatgrid, BPM and Key that safeguard doesn’t exist.

Maybe you have a backup you can restore? That might be easiest in this situation.

3

Thank you, Christiaan. That’s what probably happened. Bummer there wasn’t warning or anything like that up ahead. It’s such an amazing app otherwise.

Anyways, now what I don’t quite understand then is what the workflow would be. (I watched all the videos and read the documentation. I understand the concepts it’s just that real life workflows is always where most apps fall short, hence my asking)

I used to have iTunes as the main hub with all of my tracks being beatgridded in Serato and Key and Cue Point analyzed by Mixed in Key. A pretty common scenario I would think.

I wanted to replace all of that with Lexicon as the one stop solution. But apparently I am not clear what that workflow would look like given the restrictions you’d mentioned.

I now have a full Library in Lexicon, the Beatgrids don’t exist and the Cue Point generation doesn’t work reliably so far (often times it says it has created Cue points and then on loading there are none)

Please advise as I would really love to use LExicon as it has so many other great features.

Also, the looparound between Lexicon and Serato would seem a little cumbersome given that there is always a FULL replace of the Serato library. Isn’t there a way for Lexicon to do a ‘only replace/delete the playlists/tracks’ that have actually changed in Serato?

Thank you in advance

4

Yeah sorry that it happened. There is actually a warning when you import from iTunes the first time, but it only shows if you didn’t have any tracks in your library yet so maybe there were a few already in there from earlier. I’ll make sure that warning becomes a bit harder to miss.

Is there a backup you can restore from? The main problem is that Serato stores the grids inside the music files, so restoring those would mean a big backup probably.

You can make the sync process quicker by choosing only certain playlists to sync. You can even create a smartlist with the Date Added or Date Modified rule so you can sync only those tracks quite easily.
A Full Sync still only updates what changed, but in order to know that it needs to scan all tracks involved which is a bit slow, depending on hard drive speed. Just how Serato works, it doesn’t have one database where it stores things, but mostly everything is on each music file.

5

Is there a backup you can restore from? The main problem is that Serato stores the grids inside the music files, so restoring those would mean a big backup probably.

hm, with 50,000 mp3s this is quite an undertaking…

So Lexicon overwrites those beatgrids? Why would it do that, even tracks that it hasn’t beatgridded itself yet?

Ok, thanks for the smart rule pointer. will try that.

Speed is not an issue as I have fast SSDs.

but it is still not clear to me:

  • I beat grid tracks in Serato, Keymap them in Mixed in Key

  • I would then import the Serato library and prepare tracks/playlists/genres/naming etc in Lexicon

  • now, if I do a full sync with Serato would my beat grids be gone again? that can’t be possible…

What is the workflow you suggest?

PS: the Re-Locate function doesn’t work (neither the right click on a batch ofindividual tracks nor the ‘Find Lost Tracks’ one. I SEE the files on the hard drive, the ARE there. But whenever I point Lexicon to it it gives me this

https://www.dropbox.com/s/olwd3lkdoyr3zg3/Screenshot%202023-04-16%20at%203.51.14%20PM.jpg?dl=0

So I end up having to go FILE by File and locate the files on the hard drive. There has got to be a better way within LExicon. Or is it a bug?

6

Here are the two screen recordings for those issues I mentionend previously:

  1. Right Click Relocate not working with several tracks
  1. UTILITY - Lost Tracks not working

Please advise how to relink the missing tracks to their physical location on said SSD, thank you

7

What happened is this:

  1. Your music files had beatgrids in them
  2. Import from iTunes, no beatgrids were imported
  3. Lexicon did not have beatgrids at this point. If you analyzed in Lexicon, then Lexicons own beatgrids were added
  4. Sync to Serato
  5. Now whatever was in Lexicon is sent to Serato. So either no beatgrids or the Lexicon beatgrids. Existing cues were not affected because of the safeguard.

As for your Cue Point Generator, you have the Enable Custom Cue Anchors option enabled. That skips the generating process and bases the template on your own cues (that aren’t there, so nothing can be created). See here how that works: Guide: the fastest way to set your cues | Lexicon - DJ Library Management

The Find Lost Tracks thing happens because the tracks you are pointing it to are already in Lexicon. Which is why you get the choice between “Source track” and “Target track” when you relocate a single one. With multiple, you don’t get that choice. What you can do there is make sure the locations you are relocating to (target tracks) are not in Lexicon, so just remove them from Lexicon.

8

ok, thanks for laying it out. Makes sense now for as what has happened. Not great but yeah, it is what it is. Def a warning banner would have helped substantially :slight_smile:

—— As for the Find Lost Track part:

I don’t think I understand what the solution is you are suggesting.

First off:
How would I even KNOW what the ‘target track’ is and how is that feasible with 4700 ‘lost’ tracks that Lexicon cannot seem to find?

and then also:
I cannot REMOVE the’ target tracks’ in Lexicon as they are all across playlists and I don’t want to lose them in those.
Please try again and let me know how to solve this substantial issue. It’d be great if you could give a practical example.

—— As for the workflow ( funny there is not a single video or documentation on that anywhere)

  1. I want to have Traktor 3 do the beat grid creation now
  2. Then I want to use Lexicon for all the other fun bits and maintenance (Cue Generator and naming/cleanup in Lexicon, Album Art and Genre’s and Playlist management)
  3. Then I want to export it to Serato.

the step from 1. to 2. and then 2. to 3. are where the following questions appear:

So let’s assume the tracks have been imported into Lexicon:

A) Do I HAVE to do an ANALYZE for any of the functions within Lexicon to work?

B) How can I make sure Traktor’s (or any other DJ software’s) beat grid are properly imported and maintained and not overwritten by Lexicon?

C) What is the exact process, meaning, do I do a RELOAD TAGS on all of the tracks within Lexicon to read out the Beatgrids? and when ion this process do I use the WRITE TAGS to FiLE option. Before exporting/Syncing with Serato? Or does the export take care of all of the above?

A diagram that explains what is being saved where would help, meaning do beat grids set by other apps get saved within Lexicon database or not, do we have to do anything about that or is Lexicon taking care of it all? (Apparently not automated and foolproof as my original dilemma with the beat grids gone for 50,000 beat grids was possible to happen, the backup via icloud did not contain the beatgrids btw)

thank you

9

Find Lost Tracks:

Somehow there are 2 versions of your tracks in your library, I don’t know how that happened, maybe you dragged them in at some point. But those are probably not in any playlist so you should be safe to remove them from Lexicon. How to find them depends on how your hard drive looks… If those tracks were moved to a different folder, then you can probably remove all tracks from that folder from Lexicon? You can sort tracks by the Location column.

Workflow:
That guide is something I still have to type, haven’t gotten to that yet.

a) No, if something requires analyzed tracks then Lexicon will automatically analyze

b) Lexicon never overwrites unless you tell it to.

c) Add tracks to Lexicon, put them in a temporary playlist. Sync that playlist to Traktor and analyze there. Then import that playlist while making sure the Merge option is enabled. You will see a Specific Fields option, you can set that to only beatgrids.
Then you can sync to Serato. You never need to write to file tags yourself.

–
Serato definitely stores the beatgrids in the music files so if you had those on icloud, the grids should be in there.

10

so the lost tracks thing still doesn’t make any sense to me.

As I’d said before they ARE actually in playlists as you can see here:

So what do I do? They are mingled with the other tracks on the same hard drive and NOT in separate location!

11

If you do a search for that title “06 Digital Love” in Lexicon, do more of that same track pop up? You can search by hovering over TITLE column header at the top of the track browser.

12

yes, this is what shows up:

(I’ve applied Smart Fixes already, hence no 06 in the beginning of the name)

13

Okay good. Which one of those 2 is the one you want to keep, I assume it is the one with the orange triangle?

14

Well, I don’t know. The one that’s the most complete or preferably both and then let the FIND DUPLiCATES function do its thing.

I just tried the new update with the ‘Forced Copy’ function. It said it relocated 4700 tracks but they are all still missing in the library. I can’t believe this basic feature (find ‘broken’ file links) is so difficult to accomplish with the app…

At this point keeps me from doing the Pro subscription, thinking there’s more unsolvable trouble down the line tbh.

I fee there has got to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how YOU think that function works and what the USER expects it to do, so here it comes again:

Any DJ software has the function to FIND files on your hard drives if they are showing up as ‘unlinked’ or broken wihtin then app.

It’s usually one or two clicks of a button.

  1. These are the files that seem to have missing pointers on the HD
  2. this is where I want the software to look for them and re-link them

Bam! Done. Problem solved.

Why is Lexcion so clumsy and stubborn about NOT doing exactly THAT?

What is tat function in YOUR mind supposed to do?

15

If you think about it a bit more, you would know it’s not that simple.

If you have 2 tracks in your library, one missing and one working and try to relocate one to the other. You will always come into the situation where you want to keep the tags/playlists of the first or the second. Lexicon can’t decide that for you. Now you have the Force option to let Lexicon simply override that choice but that can lead to data loss, at your own risk.

16

I’m re-reading the thread and it seems we’re talking in circles.

Again, I am not trying to question the what and ifs etc… I have one very simple task to solve (from a user’s perspective)

How can I assign the ‘missing tracks’ to the files on my hard drive?

The mp3s ARE physically present on the hard drive.

Lexicon should be able to locate and re-establish those links. (apparently this is not a problem when I do it manually within Lexicon with the ‘Relocate’ function one by one, but it simply doesn’t want to do it neither with the ‘select several files and then ‘Relocate’ right click, nor with the Utilities ‘Lost Files’ procedure.

Please advise, this has been causing quite some headache so far.

17

I really can’t explain it any other way

18

I had a similar issue, and as Christian points out. Lexicon cannot decide which of the duplicates you should keep automatically as it does not know which is a duplicate that is the dud or fake.

19

hm, so what does ‘Find Duplicates’ in the Utility menu do then?

20