SL 1.9.2 on OS X 10.6.2 , SL1 , playing music off a thumb drive.

Fortunately wasn't a major crash. The music kept playing but Serato was stuck with an endless spinning beachball. I had CDs so I mixed one in, force quit Serato and restarted and all was well.

I always bring CDs and maybe even a few records to every gig for backup or to play during setup if needed,

You should get a mac!

Just kidding, that's just the standard response when someone with a PC posts what you just did :P

Sucks man. I always carry a 45-minute mix cd to a gig, just in case. I also have my ipod with an rca adapter cable just in case.

Do you think it had something to do with the thumb drive? Do you normally play off that?

I don't normally play off a thumb drive. I was actually playing alongside a friend who was using my setup so it was his thumb drive. We were also recording the set using Quicktime X but that should matter.

Still that was the first time the program has ever crashed on me while playing and even then music didn't stop, so I'm not sweating it too much.

I don't think it has a lot to do with the thumb drives. I mix with a total of 3 thumb drives. I like to easily transport my music without having to carry around a big external. Sometimes if im at a party/friends house and they are djing and i wanna get on for fun i use my thumb drives to play some songs.

um....congratulations?

lol

I'm tellin U, Macs and USB (Drives) & Serato - still not convinced it is 100%....

I love Firewire. That said, it could have been a corrupt file. Also recording in Quicktime may have been processor intensive. Where were you dumping the recording? What are the specs of your Mac? (Macbook or Pro, how much Ram?)

That's not a Mac?

DJJOHNNYM, the poster was being facetious - since every PC Serato crash is blamed on the PC, but in this case it was a Mac. It's well speced- new unibody MBP, 4 gig RAM and had no other programs beside QT running. One odd thing was that the drive didn't show up in the Finder sidebar though, but showed up in the Files serction of Serato.

corrupt files have been the only reason my serato ever crashed, that was 2years ago.

+1 for PC!

Given the description of what happened, my first suspect would be the thumb drive. They have a definite "lifespan" of read/writes before their memory goes bad.

A beachball in the Mac OS usually means "waiting for data".

The drive is only a few months old. It's a Sandisk Cruzer. It seems a little early for it to be having problems. Plus it worked fine once I force quit Serato and restarted. I had to restart the Mac to do a proper ejection of the drive though. As I mentioned it never showed up in the Finder. I tried to eject it in disk utility but it said another program was using it even though everything was closed. So I restarted and was able to eject.

i think some thumb drives have problems going between macs and pcs, i bought a brand new thumb drive friday, put a bunch of files off my pc and went to load them in the mac and half way through my mac said it couldnt read\write to the thumb drive, i put it in the pc and error, the thumb drive was about 15 minutes old

It's interesting you say that because my previous thumb drive from Kingston had at least a couple of occasions where it acted strange. I think it had corrupted files or couldn't copy or something like that and it always happened after switching from one platform to the next. I had to format it once. File system is always FAT32.

I can safely say it wasn't Serato's fault but the fact you are using a Thumb Drive as a primary. If you are going to use a USB thumb drive as a main music drive on a Mac at least format it as Journaled HFS+.

I've done this before and found that the Journaled format causes less issues

^^ Definitely agree about using the Mac Journaled formatting instead of FAT32.

I've seen some fairly new thumb drives get into problems with memory corruption. Supposedly the newer designs are improving, but I've always considered those drives "sneakernet" and nothing else.

Plus the access times are usually quite slow, even when working perfectly.

i have also noticed that a thumb drive and going between platforms is buggy... i have had to reformat several times. although i usually moving a ripped DVD file to my PS3.

At least you were prepared. Preparation is always key. Gigs do not always go according to planned. Many things can go wrong, Equipment can die, Serato may crash. Its good to have VINYL, CD's or iPods ready to get out of a jam.

Thanks for the info guys, I had my suspicions that cross platform FAT32 was causing the problem. It's a shame because I use my thumb drive regularly between Macs and PCs in manners unrelated to DJing.

In this case though, I was actually helping a friend transition to Serato from CDs. He also sometimes uses the new Pioneers CDJs that can read a USB drive. I haven't checked, but I'd be skeptical they support HFS+. You really need to use FAT32 unless you plan on limiting how you use your thumb drive. I may try contacting SanDisk though whether their tech support has any clue remains to be seen. Anyone use a FAT32 thumb drive cross platform in Serato without issues? If so what brand?

[quote Anyone use a FAT32 thumb drive cross platform in Serato without issues? If so what brand?


I do. I use the OCZ 32gb www.ocztechnology.com

It's interesting to hear how people deal with crashes now, If you DJ long enough lots of stuff - hardware related will eventually crash, But how you prepare and handle it is what's key.

Even in the days of vinyl and cd things would happen.

Stuff that's happened to me.
-The obvious dirty/scratched record skipping
-lifting the WRONG tonearm (too many beers)
-some idiot bumping the tonearm
-I was scratching and ripped the power button off a 1200 with my ring, the deck powered off and the button is spring loaded so no way to turn the deck back on.

-cd's skipping - DOH!!
-One cdj I had used to overheat and would play a track but right after you started the track ALL the buttons would stop responding, you had to poweroff the unit use the "key" to manually eject the cd and then not load the next one till you were ready to start the track, what a fun night.

We can also talk about amps overheating, blowing speakers, tripping fuses.

NO matter what you use you NEED a back up.
Serato (SSL , VSL , and Itch ) has crashed on me BUT 99% of the time the music continues playing and I mix a track off the iphone till the reboot is done, the crowd NEVER knows.