collection.nml does not stay at default location when moving tracks to ext. drive.

beta-d

Hi, I've moved all my tracks from one external drive to another. The old drive is a number of years old so in order to prevent any problems in the future I moved it to a new drive. Normally the location of collection.nml (on a Mac) is HD/Users/username/documents/native instruments/Traktor #.#.#(version number) which in my case is 3.2.0. I created a new folder on my new external drive and named it MyMusic. I made a back up copy of my Traktor folder before doing this and placed it in my new ext. drive. Then I copied all my tracks to the MyMusic location. I opened Traktor selected import new collection and pointed it to the collection.nml file at the path above in documents. Next I ran a consistency check and when that was finished I used the relocate function to find my tracks. So what's the problem you ask? Well Traktor started crashing on startup so I had to move my collection.nml file to the desktop and restart. This worked but I had to do the whole process again (running another consistency check and relocating the files again) which I've literally just done. My collection size has 94,000 tracks and the .nml file size is just over 92MB. It's seems to be working but now the default location for my tractor files including the collection.nml file is on my external drive. The path is external HD/MyMusic/collection.nml and all the other files that should be located at documents/native instruments/traktor #.#.# are on my external drive. These are backup, coverart, history, logs, settings, stripes, traktor settings.tsi and transients. 🤷

Can anyone help to clear this up? Thanks.

Ryan_NI

Hey @beta-d - I've reached out to the developers and this is what I've heard:

I would definitely not recommend putting TRAKTOR's root folder on an external drive, because as soon as that drive is unavailable, TRAKTOR reverts back to Documents/Native Instruments as the location of the root folder and creates an empty collection there. The second problem, when putting all songs inside the root folder, is that every update will create a copy of all tracks, which is no good.

I made a backup copy of my Traktor folder before doing this and placed it in my new ext. drive.

The user should keep their root folder in Documents/Native Instruments, but can nevertheless have all tracks on the external drive. On the external drive, he should put all their songs in a "MyMusic" folder, then relocate them, done.

If they leave the external drive disconnected, TRAKTOR will start nevertheless and show the tracks as missing, which they can fix without by connecting the external drive without even restarting TRAKTOR.

I hope this helps! let me know if you have any questions.