Bug description:
I had a gig yesterday, and quickly updated my SD-Card from lexicon before it without checking. It came as it had to: The export had pretty bad problems.
Some crates had massive amounts of unnecessary tracks. For example, Salsa/Salsa/5 Star Salsa contained 2500+ tracks instead of 325.
Salsa/Salsa was empty though. I have a feeling that those tracks were added to Salsa/Salsa/5 Star Salsa instead
Other lists had significant amount of tracks missing. Salsa/Mixable Salsa had more than half of their tracks missing
4)The order of playlists inside their folders were partially randomized on engine DJ
I fixed the worst problem (#1) by quickly reexporting only the 5 Star Salsa list, however the other problems remained.
Step by step to reproduce:
I cannot say how to repoduce this bug reliably yet. My hunch is that it happens on a re-export (since new exports were always pretty much 100% spot on. One Observation is that some folder structer was changed since the last export and a lot of smartlists were added (I can’t say for sure, but I think only smartlists were affected). I’ll try to document the errors more thoroughly. I’ll upload my library (everything good inside lexicon) and the engine DB (with the problems mentioned, except #1 was fixed during the gig).
That one really gave me a minor panic attack. I hope we can fix this On the plus side, I used Lexicons “find mixable track” feature a lot yesterday, and I’ll write a report these days. That was really valuable (actually made a few really cool mixes I would not have thought of by myself) , but I have a few suggestions.
Definitely curious about feedback for mixable tracks. I think it’s not super much used feature yet although pretty powerful with a well organized library.
Wild. I could see this being the problem after renaming and reordering. Not to keen on reexporting again, but what can you do with an engine bug like that. I’ll do some digging and let you know if something similar happens.
So, the next few posts will be some documentation of what I did and can maybe serve troubleshooting purposes for other members. Please don’t feel obligated to react to each one, Christiaan.
Doing a partial export to the same stick with just the affected playlist fixes the bug that all tracks from the subfolder are added to the first playlist
Doing a full export fixed the problem of some playlists missing items, AND it fixed the playlist ordering. However, it reintroduced the bug that all tracks from the subcrate are added to the first playlist in the folder
This indicates that if you see strangely ordered playlists on your prime device, further problems may lie ahead.
Don’t know if this holds generally or if it was an artefact of my local engine exports, but exports to local computer seemed to work fine all the way
from a previous import from USB, I noticed that strange folders appeared in lexicon, e.g. Salsa_1, Salsa_2, etc. This indicates that there are some (hidden?) folders on the export that cause problems
Troublingly, this may indicate that syncing back from a bad stick may introduce problems with your library.
I think your issue is due to the naming schemes of your folders. Engine DJ REALLY does not like similarly named sub-folders within a “master” folder. At all, actually. But for some odd reason, numbers are fine.
Basically, don’t name your sub-folders with a word that’s in your master folder. So if you’re dividing your Salsa folder by BPM, don’t name it “Salsa 128 BPM” or whatever. Just name it “128 BPM”.
Even better, once you do this Engine DJ STILL might mess it up.
I’m also interested to see what would happen if you exported your Lexicon database to either Serato DJ or Rekordbox FIRST, then import from one of those to Engine DJ and see what happens. You’ll have to wipe your entire Engine DJ library to do that to prevent any continuity issues.
Interesting. Actually that is the only folder in my collection that has the double naming problem. Easily addressable though. I’ll change this and see how it behaves on Wednesday.
Now you might have another issue because the problem tends to stick in Engine DJ even after you’ve changed names, at least it does for me in Engine DJ 2.2.2
I’ve had problems like this. My simple solution is to delete the Engine DJ-database and create a new one, by making a full export. It does take some time, because you also have to re-import track information and then make a full export again. But for my it’s a reliable method.
So, exporting to a completely fresh db solved everything but the top-crate-contains-all-tracks-from-parent-crates bug.
A good thing I noticed: I do my exports directly to an SD Card. If you only delete the engine database folder, but not the music folder, then the export goes much quicker, since LXC doesn’t need to copy the songs themselves, only the metadata.
I think I might have had a breakthrough. My situation is the following:
MacBook with partioned HDD, one partition is /Volumes/MP3/
Some temporary itunes Stuff on the OS partition
Up until now, I only deleted engine libraries on the target MicroSD. However, it bothered me to put the SD into my prime each time to check for success. So I deleted my library on /Volumes/MP3/. After opening Engine, There still were a lot of folders in terrible state. Some with old names, some with empty playlists. Completely shuffeled, etc. Turns out that those were from an engine database my primary partition, even if the folders did not have a single mp3 file from that primary partition. After deleting the library from the main partition, the next export was flawless! Okay, n=1, but it was the first flawless export I had in like 20 tries.
It looks to me like engine does some weird ID matching / crate fusing using some kind of ID. Otherwise I can’t explain why the Crates were shown correctly only with a new export present, and looked horrible when the completely outdated export on the main partition was the only one. Remember: That one showed old names. @Christiaan Is it possible that an export from lexicon directly to SD Card depends somehow on engine library folders on HDDs? otherwise I would be seriously stumped.
No, Lexicon only writes to the SD in that case, but Engine does do weird things there. It sometimes has tracks in the primary db with references to the other db’s, I don’t know why really. They made this multi-db system to prevent losing tracks when a drive letter changes which works I suppose, but it makes their whole db system super confusing.
Same for playlists, it seems to copy playlists to all db’s with references to each other and that’s why it is sometimes unclear where playlists should come from (and the reason why the troubleshooting option exists in the Engine import page).
Conclusion: I know about 95% of what Engine does to their db, the other 5% is still a mystery to me
Ugh, Denon style. Serato does the same (multi-db over several drives) but it works really flawlessly. Probably because they keep them all separated.
I still wonder why the lexicon export was the first correct one after deleting the local DBs, but it might have been coincidence after all. Maybe someone else can try to reproduce?
So you deleted your Engine Library folder, re-did everything, and it kinda came out normal?
I did that exact thing, multiple times, and my playlists were STILL screwed up. Unless there’s a directory I don’t know about buried within the SSD, not sure how you got that to work.
Sounds like Engine DJ lacks continuity, and boolean since it took them forever to properly organize numerical crates automatically.
@Christiaan not sure if this will help any, but I think it’s worth mentioning.
If I export my Lexicon DJ library to Rekordbox 6 (using the BETA export), export from Rekordbox to an XML, then export the XML to Engine DJ, the crate issue doesn’t carry over.
On the plus side, I used Lexicons “find mixable track” feature a lot yesterday, and I’ll write a report these days. That was really valuable (actually made a few really cool mixes I would not have thought of by myself) , but I have a few suggestions.