Serato DJ Lite / Intro General Discussion

Talk about Serato DJ Lite / Intro software and controllers.

File Analysis Stability

FlashFriction 11:48 PM - 18 February, 2013
Running Serato Intro DJ on a 1.5 year old MBP, which runs Mountain Lion.

So, over the past decade or so, I've spent quite some time making high quality digital files from my CDs, MiniDiscs, and vinyl, and I think, in a horribly misguided moment, a tape, with, in total, about half a dozen encoders. I've also purchased various tracks from Amazon.com and beatport... some are better than others, mostly the newer ones are better than the older ones, but they all suit my purposes.

Overall, I've got about 13k tracks.

Currently, I'm a software developer during the day... and I have to say, the number of times this software has crashed, so far, is pretty embarrassing. Trying to analyze my music, I'm getting anywhere from 50 to 500 tracks at a time before it crashes. I understand that the catalyst for these crashes are corrupt tracks, but why in the world are you not trapping these exceptions and throwing an error instead of crashing out? Is it a matter of access latency? If so, then why in the world wouldn't you make the file analysis a separate process that could be restarted by a controller process, rather than tying it in with the GUI so the whole thing just goes away?

If the only answer is to blame the corrupt tracks, and the only solution is to remove them, but you can't find out which tracks are corrupt without analyzing them, because they play totally fine, but when you analyze them, everything crashes... what am I supposed to do? Am I really left to sit in front of my computer for hours while I restart Serato every time it crashes? That's pretty lame, if you ask me.

Right now, I'm really only DJing with some low-mid end hand-me-down CDJs from a bouncer I used to work with, for fun, for parties, and the occasional small bar. Not trying to be a superstar or a cool kid. I'm really enjoying that tight platter control that Serato offers, which gives me a more vinyl-ish feel to the experience, and makes matching beats so much more enjoyable... but I do need stability, and the stability issues are giving me some serious doubts about moving to Serato as a primary medium.

You could easily take 100,000 random, low quality pictures and feed them into Photoshop, and not have it crash once... even if 99% of them were corrupt... the parser would just tell you it was corrupt, you'd click on OK, it may give you its best shot at rendering the picture... or not. Same thing with any random movie editor, Adobe Audition (and don't tell me you're using lower level access than Audition,) or any other huge number of programs like that.

What's the deal? Is Serato DJ, at least, more stable than Serato DJ Intro? I don't want to pay $129 dollars to find out I just shelled out for more features with the same beta-level stability.
FlashFriction 12:13 AM - 20 February, 2013
Just about to upgrade to 1.1.1... hope it helps the stability.
Johnny Cinco 4:18 PM - 18 May, 2013
I too have had this issue which was resolved by limiting number of tracks in database and peforming external file anaysis prior to Serato analysis.....Someone from Serato posted that there is a limit to the number of tracks you can have in your database since having too many will cause crashes. The free analysis tool i use is called mp3val to analyze/fix mp3 files and use mp3tag to add tags. These tasks are performed prior to serato analysis and have been discussed in other topics in the Serato forums.
Johnny Cinco 4:31 PM - 18 May, 2013
I am also in the IT field and agree with you 100%. What they should have done was create separate analysis tool that automaticaly fixes files or identifies problem files by
Rob Wheeler 3:06 PM - 4 July, 2015
Whilst this is an old thread, this is very interesting as I have just moved to SDJ this week together with a new Denon MC6000 Mk2 and was really excited at going over to a 'professional' DJ software from long suffering years with PCDJ Red, VRM, Reflex, and Dex1.1.

Is the large library issue resolved ???

I have a library of 30,000 audio files on a audio dedicated second internal HDD.

I have a huge library because I play many many wedding reception type gigs with all age groups and one of my USP's is that I take requests and it looks good to the people paying me if I have the song they request.

So am I going to have issues at the wedding reception tonight as I embark on my maiden voyage with my new gear and software?

More worryingly, NO Denon 4500 twin CD drive to back me up when everything goes silent on me.

I cannot control the 4500 CD drive from my new MC6000 Mk2 (I used the Denon HD2500 media player up to now that usefully also controls the twin CD drive)

I have SDJ Version 1.7.6

Appreciate an update on this large library issue as that was never a problem with PCDJ or other programs I have tried.

TIA Rob.