Hi folks, as you can see from the title i thought of starting a thread for all the new MEP 7000 OWNERS/USERS where they can put down there first thoughts on this new device.

I was at the DJ show North in leeds england on 27/7/08 to have a look at this new marvel of the dj world. I was sold on it with in the first minute. Its ease of use is so good. Plugged the ipod into it and of i went. Playlist the lot all came up making it easy to find the tracks i was loking for.
I did and have got a problem with running the mobile external drive. There doesnt seem to be enough power coming from the USB port which is a bit of a surprise as it works well on everything else.
I also had an issue with some of the music files (MP3's) coming up with an error code showing that they wouldnt work on this system. I checked them out and they are defo MP3's. A bit of a strange one.
All this aside i would say to anyone thinking of buying the unit JUST GO AND DO IT. You wont look back. It will be even better when there is native support for the likes of VirtualDJ. The only thing your going to come up against in the UK is trying to get your hands on one of these units. Only 10 were brought in with the first release!
I have not yet loaded DJS onto my OODJ laptop but should get round to this in the next few days.

thank you PIONEER

Iain

Scotland

I'm not surprised the unit had trouble with some of your MP3s - the software on the units is still pre-release and may have had a minor bug or issue playing specific bitrate files. (It could also be your files are damaged - they may play on other systems / software but the MEP is very picky and won't play any potentially corrupt audio files.)

In regards to the hard drive, it could be that the unit you're using draws more power than others - we've tested several of the "portable" variety and they all worked fine without additional external power.

thanks for the reply pulse.
i take it there will be some sort of updated software for the unit?
is there any particular makes of mobile drive you would recommend?

thanks
iain

I will pick up this gear but I will wait for about a year so most of the buges will be out and software to be updated. I will try to get this from pioneer and not an outside vendor as many of the units that are at the vendors will not be updated,I know most of the updates will be from down load or with a CD but some may requier the unit to be sent in and done by tech,support. And you will find that the vendors will not send there gear out, This happened with my CMX3000 and I would hate to get this and than have to send it in. Tech/support has always be very helpfull when I have used them but if you pay top $$$$ for gear you should not have to send it back for a simple update.

Fortunately all the new products are user-updatable so you don't need to send it in. Even if it arrives with old firmware, you can flash it and have it running just as if it came off the factory line today in a matter of minutes.

As for suggested drives, I'm sticking with flash drives for small storage and for hard drives, I use the large desktop style (which require wall power) - Seagate is my choice for performance and reliability.

Ok My Thoughts MEP7000 arrived on Thursday Friday Pulled out the Denon DN2100 and loaded the Pioneer. Started Playing with CD's plays great nice machine. Picked up another Western digital Essential 160gb to load my music on this is the same drive that I use with a Cortex player and have had no problems. Loaded my music about 100g and plugged into machine took forever for it to load. Started reading the manual said I needed to create a library Cortex Calls this a database which I can relate to better. Okay Find the Library creation utility http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Support/ProDJ/Du...P-7000.Support?tab=B
Create my library and plug it back in takes forever for it to load 3-5min now go to play a track but it takes half a minute for the track to load. Not sure whats going on maybe the drives to slow. But Will keep playing till I get it right.

I've not heard of that happening - I loaded up a 250GB drive and it was instant.

What format is the drive you're using?

Pulse,

have done the first gig with the unit with no problems. used the ipod and a flashdrive. using the ipod is'nt as nice as the flash drive due to the screen info. flash drive gives you artist and track while ipod you only get one or the other.

was sitting sorting out the tracks that didnt work on the unit. managed to get the whole thing to freeze to the point that i had to switch of the unit to reset it. i think im going to put this down to the ipod as i was going through (loading) all my mp3's one after another. i hope this was down to the ipod!

not had any problems using it/loading music to it. have found the ipod takes a bit longer to load the track where the flash drive is alot quicker. have ordered a nice 36GB flash today and will be trying it out this week.

will be interested to see what the library setting will do for it. have not looked into this yet.

iain

The Library Creator is pretty cool - it allows you to build sort lists such as Artist, Album, Genre etc... but you do need to switch from Library Mode on/off with a system reset, so it's not practical for mid-song changeups. I don't feel most DJs would be changing it during use, they'd either have it set as one or the other.

Hi Pulse,

I just purchased the MEP 7000 and I've been playing with it for a couple of days now. My initial impressions were WOW! This is great. The user interface is beautiful and very user friendly. The jog dials, scratch visuals, DVD features, excellent sound and a dozen other things...are all awesome.

Unfortunately, now for the bad news.

1. Since my laptop wasn't readily available, I created a Library on my external USB HDD using the controller unit itself. The Library took over 8 hours to build. Is this normal? My 250 Gig HDD has about 14,000 mp3 tracks on it. This is not even my entire music collection. I can only imagine how long 35,000 tracks would take to register. I read the manual and my HDD, folders and files are up to spec. I do not have more than 8 folder hierarchies and the HDD is formatted for FAT32.


3. Let's say I'm in Library browse mode and I turn the knob to search for track title and let's say I type in "It Takes Two". I get three results for "It Takes Two". The mp3 file info is not readily available. Info like Artist, Bitrate, Album, BPM, etc... takes waaay too long to load. So I don't know if I'm loading the Fatman Scoop version, the Rob Base version, or the Xmix remix version.

2. When I finally find the version I need the tracks took anywhere between 3 - 50 seconds to load in. I'm sure you know that even 15 seconds is an eternity in a real live situation. Please tell me that I'm doing something wrong and this is not normal.


4. Adding a track to a playlist also takes waaay too long.

No offense but, problems 1, 2, 3 and 4 are deal breakers for me. If this is how the unit was designed to work, I'm going to have to return it to the dealer.

Pioneer has a HUGE pro DJ history and I can't imagine that they would put out a unit that doesn't load information and tracks quickly.


Thank you for your time.

To address some of your concerns... yes, it works a HELLUVA lot faster on a computer than within the unit itself. The processor in the MEP is a sliver of what your computer is capable of. I tried with a couple hundred tracks, the MEP took a few minutes whereas the computer blinked and was done.

Items 2 and 3 (which are oddly out of order - cut and paste?) are linked to each-other and I'm not sure why that happens. I've never had a track take more than 4s to load, even when using the library mode.

I'm not sure why your playlist takes a long time to add a track - if you press and hold the data knob button, it should blink the tracklist within a couple of seconds and be done with. Does this only happen when it's in Library mode?

Hopefully we can get these issues addressed... I'd like to try and replicate it myself here so I can better understand exactly where the problem lies. Can you shoot me an email so we can discuss your HD organization? Thanks.

hi guys, another night of playing about and trying all my tracks. solved the problem with the unit freezing i think! looks like it is down to bad MP3's. the unit seems to be ultra/overly sensitive to some styles of MP3's. a bit of a shame really as you would expect things like the ipod to put the spanner in the works for not so great files.

i have been finding that the tracks do take a little bit of time to load. some though are almost instint so i think the problem might be the amount of info stored in them. would have thought that pioneer would have looked at the computing power at the time of the build and went for the best going. seems a bit daft making a new flagship model such as this with limitations from the start, although i may be wrong. all this aside im not really seeing the faults that others are finding so again it could just be down to the old MP3's.

as for the library, i learned the hard way. i made alot of virtual folders on my pcdj fx software and lost the lot which really messed things up for me. i opted to make what i class as my BEST OF folders which contain instant hits/floor fillers for every genre. now when you move to different software your big hits are going with you with not to much extra work. this also cut down the amount of MP3's i am going to be running on the MEP. normally i run with around 215GB but have chopped it down to around 17GB. its all good.

Iain

This message has been edited. Last edited by: iainalpine,

Bad MP3s are everywhere - even tracks which play "fine" on your computer may actually be corrupt or damaged. I suggest you use tools to regularly check your library of MP3s. I've linked a couple of tools here in the forums before.

Trust me when I say they balanced power with cost - they could have put much more powerful processing into the MEP but then you wouldn't want to buy it.

will have a search for your posts on checking the mp3's. to tell the truth have never carried this out as have always taken it if it works its fine. maybe not the best approach.

have now loaded all my mp3's onto the new 36 gb flash drive and the music loads without fault and very quickly so im gonna stick to this style. easy to carry and update. still cant get over having something like a flash drive with 36gb space. its a scary world.
seeing the unit working with this i take back what i said about processing power. just put it to new user hic-up!

have been looking through the virtual dj forum and there a few guys asking about the unit and wondering if there will be native with it. they seem to think not possible due to the display etc! any ideas on this pulse. cant wait to get out thursday night and rock the gig with the MEP. 1200 people are gonna bounce to the tunes of the 7000. bring it on

Iain

I know that Virtual DJ is working hard to get native mode support for the CDJ400 and MEP7000 / SEPC1. It may take them a while to get everything up to snuff as what shows up on the display is entirely up to the software engineers (not Pioneer) to figure out.

And I think you mean 32GB, not 36GB.

quote:

Originally posted by Pulse:
I've not heard of that happening - I loaded up a 250GB drive and it was instant.

What format is the drive you're using?

This is a brand new fat32 formatted drive the only thing i've done to the drive is delete the original files stored on it wich weren't needed. This drive is a 5400rpm would this make a difference?

Mmmm, shouldn't -- it could very well be damaged MP3s which are causing the problem. Have you scanned them with some of the tools I've linked?

pulse, thats good to here that there is a push to get native for the unit. this will generate a lot more sales with it being able to work with software like that.
and yes i stand corrected, it is a 32gb flash. all the excitment has just about taken me over the edge

oh, does anyone no of an easy way to change NTFS to FAT32. had a look last night and my hard drives run the NTFS.

The flash drive works a treat

Ok Now we have two parties on the MEP7000 I picked up a powered 250g western digital hard drive it worked better. Initial load up is several minutes. Song load up is slow compared to cds which are instant. It seems as if it loads more than just the one song and that's why it takes it so long but im not sure what it's doing. just a pain Im used to making 30-50sec cd changes and when it takes a minute for the song info to load I have to readjust to use this player constatly thinking farther forward than I have in the past. The good thing is that I have plenty of options between cd's and mp3's.
But it defeats the goal of going all mp3 with cd as back up.

quote:

Originally posted by Pulse:
Mmmm, shouldn't -- it could very well be damaged MP3s which are causing the problem. Have you scanned them with some of the tools I've linked?

Yes Scanned all MP3's with MP3 Validate some were bad and needed to be fixed didn't make any difference in load times