External harddrive pain / multiple laptops

Questions
1

I’m getting absolutely frustrated when trying to get djay Pro working with an external hard-drive.

What I want to achieve:

  • Everything is on external harddrive
  • I can switch laptop / gear wherever I go

It’s very simple actually and basically what every DJ does: I mean no-one has their whole music collection and settings solely on some 256GB MacBook right? We need backups and redundancy.

Baseline: I’m using Music (prior iTunes) to manage my music collection on an external harddrive.

Problems I face:

  1. Other laptop doesn’t detect the tracks on the harddrive
  2. Other laptop doesn’t have playlist and analyzed data
  3. All djay Pro settings are back to default

For 1: I have to first alt + open Music on another laptop and mess with their location of the music library / set it to the external drive. Only then djay Pro will take the system configured Music library. Why can’t I just say: Music library is here in the settings and it will just take it from the external drive. Why must I mess with the host system? Traktor does that much better..

For 2: There seem to be no setting to set the location of the djay Pro library & settings. What the hell is that? I’ve tried symlinks, I’ve tried batch scripts in combination with LaunchAgents to work around your limitations. Nothing works really.
As a last resort I now tried to copy and paste my ~/Music/djay folder manually from Mac1 to the external hard-drive and copy it back from there to Mac2 ~/Music/djay. This step is very risky, since I can just lose data when doing that in the wrong order or forgetting about it, it’s just a mess.

For 3: Copying ~/Music/djay is not even enough. There seem to be more settings stored yet somewhere else to make the confusion complete. Even manually copying your djay folder will not set me up.

Conclusion
All this led me to give up and use Traktor as my backup system again when I have to switch gear. This doesn’t happen too often. But it’s straight up frustrating, because I really wanted to switch to djay Pro eventually. Also, my stuff is not really backed-up, I mean my iTunes music library yes, but all the djay Pro related stuff? If someone spills a drink it’s game over, my hard-drives are backed up at least..

Appeal
Boys & Girls, please: Realize how actual real DJs use this software and hardware together and understand that these requirements to the software are just plain basics. We need to be able to have our stuff fully on external drive. If we need a backup, switch gear or a drink gets spilled this is the only way to work. Having the software hard-limited to the system that it is installed on is not the way to go.
I really want to use djay Pro, but you are making it hard for me at times.

Best,
DJ BlockParty

2 Likes
3

This here is your problem, bro…
Been there, done that. Not sweet. In future when your library grows big, “Local Music” library will start to be buggy and freeze on you mid-set.
Take time, and move your library to “My collections”
Once you do that, all you have to do is to copy djayMediaLibrary file from Music>djay folder onto the same location in target macbook. All your playlists will show up as on your mac.

4

Hi @BlockParty, please refer to the linked FAQ below on this topic and let me know if this helps with your workflow or not: https://help.algoriddim.com/hc/en-us/articles/360014703632-How-do-I-play-or-add-songs-from-SD-Cards-USB-sticks-and-external-hard-drives-in-djay-Pro-for-Mac

6

Hello! It’s been a week since my last reply. I’m going to consider this topic completed for now so I can focus on others. However, please feel free to respond and we can definitely revisit this. Thanks!