Hey Reflex,

It sounds like you're importing music from an external drive and its formatted for Windows thus SSL isn't able to write information to it.

Check the format of your drive:

1. Ctrl+click on your external hard drive icon that is sitting on your desktop.
2. Choose 'Get Info'.
3. Look under 'Format' to see the format of your drive.

If the drive is formatted Window NTFS you will need to reformat the drive before you'll be able to "write" information to the drive.

Please read this article on how to reformat the drive --> serato.com

Zach S - thanks for the info, but I am not using an external hard drive. When I recently got my Mac, I transferred all the music files from PC to Mac (internal HD) and also copied the Serato folders over the Mac as well. I've since rebuilt the database v2 files and the crate files on the Mac.

Today I loaded up Scratch Live and it only scanned about 200 songs instead of the 400-500 it did the other day. I'm not sure what is going on here!?! :)

I did notice that most of the songs that it has to rescan upon opening SL are ones that do not have artist names, BPM info, or genre tags and when I played them, the wave forms were not built yet. I rescanned those files.

Do these files have a lock icon next to them?
If you open the _Serato_ folder within the Music folder do you see any files with the word "safe" next to them?

Nope - no "safe" files in the Serato folder(s).

It's so random. Tonight at a gig, it had to rescan most of my library. It also reset the green text back to white on all but 3 of my video tracks. Hmmm.

It is also bringing in files that I have deleted a while ago. Of course if I try to load them, it tells me that that song does not exist. I will continue to rebuild the crates and/or copy the crate files from my PC over to the Mac again.

I figured out that Serato does not like iTunes .m4v video files very much either. It does no tag them very well. I'll have to use Handbrake to recode them.

Ok.. try this:

Shut down SDJ.

Open the Music folder on the internal drive.
Rename the entire _Serato_ folder to _Serato_1.
Re-open SDJ.

It should read your tags initially but test it afterwords and let me know if you need further assistance.

Zach,
Thanks - I renamed the Serato folder to Serato_1. It did not initially load any music files upon opening, but I simply used the "files" tab to reload all my videos and music. That seemed to fix the problem of Serato wanting to rescan hundreds of files every time I open it, but now I have two other problems:

1) How to I reconstruct my crates? Can I just copy the old crate files from old Serato_1 folder into the new Serato folder? What crate files should I use? I also have the Serato backup folder.

2) A lot of my video files (mostly .m4v) lost their tags (artist, BMP, genre, color, etc.) I tried rescanning and analyzing them, but to no avail. Any way to get the tags back or do I have to manually go back and retag them?

Ok.. at this point do this:

Shut down SSL.
Open the Music folder.
You will see a new _Serato_ folder.
Open the _Serato_1 folder and copy the Subcrates folder as well as the Metadata folder (if you see one).
Paste it into the _Serato_ folder.
Re-open SSL from there.

Nope - Back to the exact same problem. :( Could it be a bad crate file? I tried the whole process over again with only the Subcrates folder (not the Metadata folder) and I get the same issue. Should I rebuild the crates again?

Is there any way to see that songs it is reloading each time? The list goes by too fast to read. I can check those particular songs.

Thanks for the continued help.

Ok.. so it may be a corrupt crate.



Currently you have X amount of crates in your Subcrates folder that SSL is reading.

Try this:

Shut down SSL.
Open the _Serato_ folder.
Rename the Subcrates folder to Subcrates1.
From there, create a new folder within the _Serato_ folder and name it Subcrates.

Now open the Subcrates1 folder and copy half of the crate files in there and then paste them into the Subcrates folder.

Now open SSL.

If it crashes again shut down SSL, go back into the Subcrates folder and remove half of the crates in there.
Now re-open SSL again.

Does it still crash?

If so, shut down SSL again and take half of the remaining crates within the Subcrates folder.
You get the idea.

Hopefully that will narrow down the culprit crate(s).

Zach - again, thanks for the help. I went ahead and rebuilt all the crates (just copied the files into newly made crates - i.e. "Slow Jams" into "Slow Jams 2"). I then rebuilt the database v2 file and reloaded all the mp3 files into Serato. Now when I open Serato, it only wants to read the tags for about 20-30 songs and it only takes a second or two. Not bad considering the load times before.
I still can't tell which songs it is trying to read except for the last one (the words scan so fast). I will try to analyze the songs that I think it is scanning to see if there are any errors with the actual files.

I will try your remedy as well tonight with a few of the crate files. Thankfully, I only have about 9 or 10 crates. I can live with it for now as long as it doesn't take too long to load or scan the songs AND if Serato finds the songs when I search for them. Retagging a few video files shouldn't take long either.

Tschüss

Zach -

So I followed your scenario with half the crates, and eventually each crate individually. It seems that no matter which crate(s) combination I load, Serato always wants to rescan multiple ID Tags each time. I've analyzed the snot out of my files and converted all .m4v video files to mp4 with Serato Handbrake settings.
Although this is not a huge problem, loading the tags each time I open Serato clears out the play history (green text) on those tracks I usually play - AND - resets the Added date. I frequently use the Added tags to track newer music. Now it just shows that I added half of my library today! Every day!
I've also noticed that there are a few songs that will not appear in the Search Box when I know I have those songs. I'll have to re-input entire libraries of music just to catch a few missing songs from the search.

This is frustrating. Are there any other issues that can cause this erratic behavior. My PC works just fine and has never had any issues like this.

Again - Thanks for your help.

Interesting I've had that happen with 2.5 and I am now using 2.4.4 with no issue of rewriting tags.

If this is happening its gonna because you have a a corrupt databaseV2 file.
Try rebuilding it/them --> serato.com

Nope - still does it.... re-reads tags on about 200-300 songs (random ones) each time.

Not sure if there is anything left to do but re organize crates from the ground up. It took about 8 years the first time, so I'm not going to try that again! :)

Thanks for your help, but I'll close this one out.

Zach S
I'm at a loss. I've rebuilt the databasev2 file, recreated every one of my crates, analyzed every song and video file, and cleaned out all corrupted files...

And Serato STILL wants to read the tags every time I open Scratch Live. And I've also noticed that it will not load all tracks. I have to manually re-import several mp3 and video files every time I use Serato.

This resets the play count (green text), and "Date Added" info every time. There has got to be to fix this. I never had this issue on my Dell PC - only with my current Mac.

I have my files stored on the internal hard drive, but I did notice that the "Music" folder shows in Finder twice. Once under Music and again under Reflex - Music. I named my profile Reflex. Could it be that SSL is reading the files from two different sources? Is there a difference in profile locations on a Mac? I'm not all that familiar with how the file system works on Mac.

If you take out all your video files from Serato do you still have this issue?

How much room do you have left on your hard drive(s)?

Zach - I have over 350 Gig free on the hard drive (plenty of room). Total music and video only uses about 120 Gig so far - about 10k songs and 700 videos.

How should I remove the video files? Alt + Delete? Only remove them from Serato library?

I already ran all of my .m4v files through Handbrake (on Serato presets), but I will try it. You think it might be a video issue?

What should I do after I remove them? Will databasev2 still be affected or will I have to rebuild it again? When I reload video files, will they show up in their appropriate crates again? Just want to know what to expect before I go thrashing around with my library management. :)

Ok.. do this.

Shut down SSL.

Rename the entire _Serato_ folder within the Music folder to _Serato_1.

Now re-open SSL.
If you have the 'read iTunes library' option checked than uncheck it.

You should then have an empty library.
Now only import your audio files.

Test.

If you find it works fine than the issue is probably video file related.

At that point import your videos again and retest.

Note: You can get your original library back by shutting down SSL, deleting the newly created _Serato_ folder within the Music folder and renaming the _Serato_1 folder back to its original _Serato_ name.

Let me know your findings:)

Ah-ha! I think we've got something. Serato only wanted to re-read the tags AFTER I imported the video files. It seems to be a video related problem.

So... how do I fix it? Is there any way to tell which video files are the culprits? I analyzed all the video files, but I can't see any icon to show that they are corrupt. I have a few that are just visuals (no audio) for general background effects - any possibility that these might be an issue? I did notice that the last file to be retagged was one of these.

Thanks for your continued help! Job security I guess. :)

I would post in the Serato Video help section. We (Rane employees) don't deal with video or anything video related. That is all dealt with by Serato.

At least we've identified the problem - thanks.

Definitely:) Let me know if you need further assistance on the audio side of things:)

OK - I don't know if this is audio or video... But, I renamed original Serato folder to _serato_old. I opened Scratch Live and re-imported only the audio files. Closed and reopened Serato and everything seemed to work fine. Now I have to recreate my crates...

I figured I could just import the crate files from old Subcrates folder into new _Serato_ folder (one at a time BTW), but when I did (even just one), I was back to the same problem.

It still wants to re-read all the tags and reset the added dates.

Now, I try this - I went back to the original _Serato_ folder and retagged the "remixer" column of all my rock music. (Added "rock" to the remixer column.) I figured that when I switched back the newly created Serato folder, I could just pull up all those songs and drop them into a new Rock crate. Nope! When I opened the new Serato folder with no crates created yet, only a handful of songs that I retagged with the remixer column showed up as tagged! Songs that I know were in the old Rock crate AND had been tagged as such showed no new tag in the remixer column - it was just blank. My plan of recreating the crates in the new Serato file was foiled!

I'm back to square one - there has GOT to be a solution to this.

If you moved your old crate files into the new _Serato_ folder SSL will need to add all the files in those crates to a new database. You will see the tags getting written when these files are being added to the new database and the files will all revert to the current date because its a new database.


Try rescanning the id3 tags.