Can't Read Collection.nml file During Import Another Collection

Hi all,

I am in the process of moving my Traktor 2.11.3 environment to a desktop pc from a laptop for analysis purposes and am running into a major problem. I'm following the instructions in the article 'How to Transfer the TRAKTOR Collection, Playlists and Settings from One Computer to Another'.

At the point of importing the collection.nml file onto the new pc, the process starts normally by asking about which tags should be imported but I get a message that the collection.nml file cannot be read several minutes later. I copied the file onto an external drive several times and the new pc's desktop with the same results, yet the file is ok on the source pc.

Both machines are running Windows 10.

Thanks for any help in advance.

 

Hmmm, any chance that the collection.nml file is encrypted or secured in any way?

Did you copy the collection.nml file into the new Traktor folder as instructed?

 

Yes I copied the file as instructed in the article to 2 separate ntfs formatted drives, yet the collection works fine on the laptop pc that i use for djing.

 

does the target PC already contain a Traktor collection?
if not you can just take the collection.nml from the source PC's Traktor folder and put it in the target PC's Traktor folder.
The traktor folder usually resides at ~/documents/native instruments/Traktor X/
another thing worth checking is the language settings on both PCs, if that's identical. There might be a problem with UTF8 Vs UTF16 character encoding there

 

Both machines are running Windows 10 and the language is english(united states). If you are up to it, I can try to upload my collection.nml file so you can see if the problem is the UTF8 Vs UTF16 character encoding that you spoke about.

 

If this is encoding problem/ some file has weird tags, you can try to open collection as text /xml and if file will be checked (validator plugin - https://atom.io/packages/linter and https://atom.io/packages/linter-xmllint ) if it is correct xml and show you line/file where is problem. I had to to this once or twice, i used https://atom.io/

 

I found the issue. It seems that the collection.nml file was corrupted by a program crash. Because of this, the file was not written to disk correctly.

I found this out by opening the collection.nml file in a text editor(UltraEdit). Looking at the end of the file, I noticed that the last line of the file was not completely and correctly written. I then compared this to the backup copy of the collection.nml file and saw how the end of the file was written correctly.

I was able to use a backup copy of the collection.nml file that I am now using for analysis on the desktop pc which has a quad-core cpu. The backup file covered 250,000 tracks but the database contains almost 600,000 tracks so the increased horsepower should make short work of the non-analyzed tracks. Once done, I'll copy everything from the desktop back to the laptop for djing purposes.

At this point the desktop pc is re-analyzing the entire database to give me a complete and clean database that will be then copied over to the laptop pc.

Going forward, I'm going to use the desktop pc to import and analyze any new tracks added to the database then copy the necessary files over to the laptop for dj use.

Thanks for all the suggestions.