Overview

Denon sells nice hardware, but not so great software... Denon's Engine Prime (EP) still has a lot to improve when it comes to beat detection and beat grid.

Although EP allows you to import from Serator, Rekordbox or Traktor libraries, the beat grids get erased... Pretty annoying.

PlzFixEP is an open-source project which goal is to provide utils to export beat grids to Engine Prime.

Supported imports:

• Traktor -> Engine Prime
• Rekordbox -> Engine Prime

Usage

First of all, BACKUP your Engine Prime files ! (Location: Music/Engine Library)

0. See installation
1. Import your tracks normally in Engine Prime.
2. Analyse them in Engine Prime.
3. Close Engine Prime
4. Run the main.py script:

# Rekordbox -> Engine Prime
python3 main.py rekordbox
# Traktor -> Engine Prime
python3 main.py traktor

# Advanced: specify the locations.json path:
python3 main.py traktor /home/my_user_name/some_custom_file.json

5. Re-open Engine Prime. Should be good to go

Installation

• install python3
• install the required packages:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

• create a locations.json file. It should look like:

{
    "traktor": "SOME_PATH/collection.nml",
    "rekordbox": "SOME_PATH/rekordbox_library.xml",
    "engine_prime": "SOME_PATH/Engine Library/"
}

(see locations.json.template)

Note: you can ignore traktor or rekordbox if you're not using one of them.

Notes

Exporting rekordbox collection to xml

Go to rekordbox, click file-> Export collection to xml format.

Contributing

You're very welcome to contribute if you want to pull request improvements / bugfixes, there's still a lot to do ;)

Here's a few quick tips to get started:

• Engine Prime uses SQLite, and the database files are located in ~/Music/Engine Library/.
• m.db contains the overall information on your library (track lists etc.)
• p.db contains an interesting table for this project: PerformanceData, which itself has a column beatData. That's where the beat information is stored, and that's a binary that required quite a bit of reverse-engineering.
• Engine Prime uses a very weird serialization for beatData (see beat_data.py); EP stores a bunch of BeatAnchors, which are used to define the beat grid & BPM.
• Engine Prime tends to write to its databases upon being closed.

At this point, there's still a few unknowns in beat_data.py. Feel free to explore and offer smarter interpretations beatData's binary representation.

Credits & Licensing

Original author: Quentin PIERRE (student at Mines Paristech)

PlzFixEP is an open-source helper to import data into Engine Prime Copyright (C) 2020 Quentin PIERRE

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Thanks

I used Ghidra quite intensively to reverse engineer EP. That's a great piece of software, do check it out ;)

Ghidra homepage: https://ghidra-sre.org/