Hi there Frankie,

How full is the hard drive? What is the used capacity?
Also, what format is the hard drive?

Can you please list the steps you take to encounter this problem, the more detail you give me the easier it will be for me to help diagnose :)

Cheers

Hi Scott. Western Digital 2TB external - Formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - used=1.49 TB - available=512 GB - permissions are Read&Write for everyone
When launching Itch I have Itunes playlist in crates view window. These files reside on 2TB External. When External is mounted, the crates view window shows folders from External as crates but some are not displayed & it will show upper left 'red, yellow, green' buttons in their place. I cannot get Itunes playlist to display again or rename crates.
When I imported a portion of files to use (mp3's only) onto the local hard drive, Itch & NS7 work flawless as I can tell.
I'll try to get screenshots.
Thanks.

Hi there Frankie,

How much RAM do you have in your computer?

1.5TB is a LOT of music to have ITCH read, so I can understand why you might be having issues. Also, those 1.5TB of music isn't on your local drive for ITCH to freely access, it has to bypass to iTunes, which is reading the files from somewhere on your external.

So the 1.5TB of songs are going from your External hard drive, through to your iTunes, then going through to ITCH. This is A LOT of work for your computer to do and ITCH may have a hard time dealing with this amount of data.

This is why when you imported some songs onto the local drive everything works fine, as ITCH is able to freely access them from an internal drive.

Also, this is predominately the reason we don't recommend using iTunes as your main music organizer. When you download a file, and bring it into iTunes, it will scan the file and make an edited copy of it somewhere in the iTunes library folder on your computer.
So now your computer technically has a duplicate of the file (which is optimized for the iTunes library) and other data that iTunes has added. Imagine this for your all 1.5TB of music!
•


The reason why the hard drive might be working flawlessly in other applications is because most programs only access the hard drive when they need to. You select a file and then the application will scan the hard drive and look for that file. With ITCH, when you start up the program, it does a full analyzation of your drives to get all the info and track data from your songs ready to be played in ITCH.

Remember, it is more than just "playing" a song from a file, track data needs to be read, the ability to "Scratch" means the track is being accessible at all times, Waveform data, ID3 information, Cue points ready to drop on the fly etc. All this info needs to be analyzed and ready to go, rather than staying dormant for when the application needs it like other programs. Hope you are able to understand where I'm coming from!

My only suggestion is try to cut down the size of music you are having ITCH read. I know every DJ loves their whole collection, but do you actually play every one of your 1.5TB of songs?

Try moving a decent amount over to your Local drive (maybe 100GB or so) if possible, and just see if that makes any difference. Try that and let me know how you get on :)

Cheers :)

Hey Scott. RAM=8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 and I do get where your coming from. I have a migration plan. Will let you know. Be well.

Hi Scott. It is nice to have a whole collection on hand but not necessary. I am treating the 2TB as a main database and, with Itunes 'MIGRATION' action, have been importing needed tracks to the local (500GB) hard drive. I also upped to video and have work ahead but all seems GOOD TO GO right now. Hope to try it with the NS7FX tomorrow. Thanks again.

Yes i understand your need for a database, we have heaps of users who have terabytes of media that they wouldn't want to get rid of, however our software works best when it is just a laptop and your controller. No USB hubs, No external Hard drives, no other USB devices. This way ITCH can focus on playing/mixing rather than reading all the data from other sources!

Im definitely not saying you should ditch all your music, just find a way to organize your keep your "most played" tracks on the local drive, and then your "requests" on another drive. If you don't want heaps of songs clogging up your local drive then you can maybe get a smaller hard drive 250gb-500gb (preferably firewire or 7000rpm for fast load speeds!). Im not saying you NEED to, just an idea :)

Hope this helps you out, and let me know if you still get any problems :)

Cheers!

Hi Scott. I got everything woking using "consolidate files" in iTunes to eliminate need for external. Now files are located on local drive. I upgraded to video. After tagging some ID3 tags, now Itch will open then hang/freeze. It wont crash but it never opens fully. I have 125GB free on a 500GB drive.

BTW.... I was using it with no problems for a couple of days. The only thing different was the import of files & I deleted 'corrupt' ones. Even deleted 'trash' bin.

Hi guys.

I know this is not part of the main discussion but I'd rather share this.

I saw a 1TB internal hard drive but it has a 16mb cache and 5400rpm. Would that hard drive still be usable with Serato Itch with the same computer specs mentioned above?

Some people here in the forum preferred the 7200rpm hard drive than the 5400s.

If you can suggest something, please do! Thanks!


:D

Hi 2.Um.@.Xm,

If you have any more questions please start you own discussion thread :)

Yes, that drive will be usable with ITCH. However the reason a lot have people have preferred the 7200RPM drives is because they are faster than the 5400RPM drives. Obviously with a faster drive you get quicker load times and a more prompt response from the drive when searching/transferring data.

Cheers

Hi Scott. As said earlier, the local drive solved the original problem but after a couple days of being upgraded to video, Itch freezes on load. I was able to use Itch1.2 with NS7 but,
I CANT USE ITCH 2.2 AT ALL.
I tried reinstall, even deleting some mp3's to cut down on analyze time. 125GB free on a 500GB. Mac OS 10.6 / RAM=8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Still not working. Any ideas?

Can you describe a little bit more on this? What part on start up does it freeze exactly? The blank startup grey screen? Or does it freeze when you can see the decks and your library?

You said that you upgraded to Serato Video, did you have Video-SL previously?

Does it freeze even without the hardware (NS7) connected?

I purchased NS7FX and got Itch 1.1 / then upgraded to 2.0 and once the external problem was solved I authorized the video. It was working fine with NS7 and video for days. I was updating library without NS7 one day. Then on the next startup, without the NS7, Itch shows decks then says loading crates and does nothing further. The previous version (1.1) works just fine solo and with NS7 and used the same music library. My next step is analyze with 1.1 to see if any corrupt files are the culprit. At this time It (2.2) still doesn't work.

What version of Serato Video did you download?

Find this out by going SETUP > Plugins > Serato Video > Info > Version Number

Cheers

I cant get into program for 'setup' but info from icon says '2.2.0' The one that still works is '1.4.1'
Thanks.

@ 2.Um.@.X Could you post the link where you saw 1TB internal drive? Thanks.

Hi Frankie, that is your ITCH version, I was talking about your Serato Video version. Do you know if you downloaded Serato Video 1.0.1?

Try installing 1.0.1 from our website here, and it will overwrite your old version > serato.com

After installation are you able to open ITCH? I find it weird that ITCH would start crashing only after installing Serato Video.

Cheers