Hi Phil,
I know the feeling. At one point I was close to 60k tracks. I boiled that down to about 45k now. Mostly by getting rid of duplicates/varying versions of tracks, the low end stuff I can do without (everything under 192MPB3) and artists/albums that have very little “request-value”.
So, yeah I fell into the digital era trap of collecting (hoarding?) all music I thought could ever come in handy. Now I have been a mobile DJ forever and we managed just fine with our 16k tracks CD collection of which most was never played either.
I have taken another approach. I am following the guidelines handed down in the Digital DJ Masterclass course (I hear rumors of it opening up again soon) about building and managing a collection.
I have started with a clean iTunes library, JUST for my main DJ COLLECTION. Nothing else goes in there, certainly not my private collection. So in your primary collection there will be only the tracks that you have carefully selected to be in there. In a few months I hope to have it in running order and I am striving to keep in under 2000 tracks (which in the vinyl days was unimaginable and about realistic in the CD age).
I’ll be running my request-collection from an external HD. First I’ll use something like beatunes to clean it up even further. Look for missing metadate (tags) and weed out the really bad quality stuff. Since this stuff will be used ‘request-only’, all I need is to be able to search for the tracks. This can be done rather easily in either your DJ software (by going to the files tab and just using the search function), your OS or an extra tool (like beatunes).
My main collection will be organised in mini-playlists, smart-playlists and such and be what I use every gig for 90-95% of the time.
Multiple iTunes libraries is good when it comes to prep-work, but won’t help in a live gig setting, because you will have to switch between libraries by starting up iTunes in switching mode. Not very practical.
.
