Installation of Engine

Getting Started

In order to have a successfully running Engine system, you need to go through a series of steps:

Download and install the software.
Open Engine-Configurator and activate your licence.
For the evaluation version, you will see a dialog showing all the options that are available to test, and enable as many of these as you are interested in. You can change this selection in future.
Within the Engine-Configurator, enable the number of processing ESP modules that you wish to test (for an evaluation licence), and set them to be active. Permanent licence versions have a fixed number of ESP modules, matching your purchase.
Within Engine-Configurator, create some workflow profiles, including setting up your Loudness requirements, and Dolby E Encode metadata etc as required, and process some files to check these. Note that the Engine-Configurator does not use any of the API services, so these need to be configured separately for Windows computers.
On Windows, open Services.msc so that you can configure Eflow. On Mac and Linux, these run as daemons and no additional configuration steps are required.
Change the user log on for the Eflow service to a user that has access to the source and destination folders that you will be using on your network.
Back using Engine-Configurator, create some watch folder settings if you will be using these. Note that API based tools on Windows platforms are not compatible with mapped folders, so all folders that are to be accessed over the network must be configured using server name.

For Windows installation, the software is provided as a single setup-Engine-eval.exe (evaluation version) or setup-Engine-VX.X.X-Perm.exe for purchased licences. The software is compatible with 64 bit versions of Windows including Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016 or newer. Windows XP, 7 and 8/8.1, and Windows Server 2008/2012 are not supported. 32 bit operating systems are not supported.

You can run the provided .exe and accept default responses throughout the installer. At the end of installation, you will have an ‘emotion’ folder that will be placed inside your C:\Program Files. Engine is a 64 bit application and will not install on to 32 bit operating systems. Files Installed (Windows) Most files are installed into the Emotion folder inside Program Files. This folder contains all the executable used by the system, plus various dll files.

The installation also places user files into this folder - C:\Users\Public\EmotionData Here you will find the ticket (licence). This is also the location of workflow and job profiles, stored as SQLite databases. There are also files used for report creation. Log files are, by default, also saved in this area.

Eflow

Eflow runs as a service on Windows platforms. It will install and start automatically during the installation, and run using the standard system user. The current version of Eflow runs at port 44544. This is not configurable.

Note that the Windows Eflow service must be configured with appropriate user credentials to match the storage locations being used. Eflow may not run correctly with default credentials.

By default, Windows always allocates administrator privileges to new services during installation. The administrator user WILL NOT be able to access files across your network. Therefore you will need to go into the properties of the Eflow service, and change the Log On user to a user that has been granted specific access rights to all the folders that Eflow will need to use. To open the Services dialog, go to the Start button, and in the ‘Run’ section, or ‘search for files’ section, type “services.msc”. Scroll down to Eflow, then right click on Eflow and select ‘properties’ from the drop down menu.

Click the tab for ‘Log On’, and next to ‘This account’ enter the user details for a user that has permission to access your network storage, then click OK. You will then need to click ‘restart’ to have the new user settings accepted.

In addition, for the watch folders on your network to be monitored, the log on credentials for the Eflow service must be a user that has been granted specific access rights to the watch folders.

This completes the steps required to correctly configure the Engine software within the operating system.

The remainder of this article provides additional information on the various parts of the Engine system, and summarises how they work together.

Engine–Configurator Application

Each Engine system will have one Engine-Configurator application. This lets you configure workflow profiles, your watch folders, and lets you select how many ESPs, and how many watch folders you wish to use during an evaluation of your system. For permanent licences, you would also use this tool when activating the licences, or adding new options at a later stage. It also lets you disable watch folders cleanly, which is something you might wish to do before shutting down the system, or prior to installing software updates.

Report Customisation

All PDF reports created by Engine import the contents of a file called customer.png and display this at the top left of the report. The path to the file for both Windows and Apple Mac are shown below.

C:\Users\Public\EmotionData\Report\customer.png (Windows)
/Users/Shared/EmotionData/Report/customer.png (Apple Mac)

You can replace this file with any png of your choosing and can use this to place your own logo on to the reports. The graphic should maintain a similar size to the original to avoid excess scaling. The logo size in customer.png is 669 pixels wide by 462 pixels high.

If reports are requested when processing files, Engine firstly creates an XML report. This is converted to PDF and the formatting and contents are controlled by a style sheet. The default style sheet is named ‘emotionStyleSheetEight.xsl’ and is also found in the Report folder.

This style sheet should not be edited as it will be overwritten during software upgrades. If you wish to customise the PDF reports, then you should instead edit the file named ‘emotionStyleSheet_custom.xsl’.

You can force Engine to use this stylesheet instead of the default, by selecting Report Options from the Advanced menu within Engine-Configurator. The custom style sheet is not overwritten during software upgrades.