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Organising music for multiple DJ gigs

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  • May 11, 2015 at 1:39 pm #2192161
    bob6397
    Participant

    My advice would be to make use of the playlist folders in iTunes – start off by sorting out your playlists into different folders – I do it by date with a different set of folders for the different types of DJing I do – so I have a “Weddings” folder, and in that are other folders, such as “15-01” or “15-02”. And then my playlists are in there – following a specific format for the name. As DJay 2 (my backup) doesn’t read playlist folders (out just displays them all in one huge list), I use a format which describes which folder it is in and the date and then the event name – so an example would be “WED 15-01-05 Large Wedding 80s Music”

    What I also do is never download a track during a gig – unless it is really important. I have all my tracks organised in a proper folder structure in one place on my hard drive (iTunes does this for me) and then I have my entire music library analyzed in my DJ software.. That way I have instant access through the search function to any track in my library…

    Up to you how you do it – the important thing is to have a system 🙂

    bob6397

    May 11, 2015 at 8:38 pm #2192311
    DJ Vintage
    Moderator

    Hi Chris,

    I consider myself to be in the same “place” you are. Coming from CDs, having collected a huge CD collection over the years, then buying my first “digital” system (Numark D2Director anyone?) which came with a decent size collecion on an external HD (bought tracks) and being a not-so-big fan of iTunes (being nice here), I ended up importing the whole shazam in my DJ software (Traktor at first, later Mixvibes Cross) and was going crazy.

    Recently I started to create a new collection from scratch, importing it all into iTunes and use it from there in my DJ software.

    I am trying to set the size of the collection to a maximum of 1.000-1.200 tracks tops. This will cover most genres (including some wedding specific stuff, tropical, salsa, ballroom, etc.) I use, with enough tracks in each to get through any gig. The rest of my tracks will sit on an external HD which I can take with me to request- and/or genre-heavy gigs like weddings. I will just search for them through the file explorer. They will not be part of my official collection anymore but will be there when I need to play that specific request.

    Here are some good tips as well: http://www.digitaldjtips.com/2015/05/7-rules-music-organisation-new-digital-djs/

    May 13, 2015 at 4:11 am #2193031
    Lamid45G
    Participant

    Just dont do the organizing in Windows Explorer/Finder, thats a LOT of headache

    Like Chuck too, i dislike the Itunes, i do most of my organizing in Rekordbox and Serato, vice versa, If i happened to make my list under rekordbox, and i liked it, i just simply dragged them to Serato for future use/references

    I mostly labeled it per gigs, and made subfolder under it, I named it depends, sometimes i named it by genre, or Beginning, MID, End,

    May 13, 2015 at 1:11 pm #2193481
    Douglas Budde
    Participant

    Hummm…my way is a little more personal…
    On the HD I have the following folders:
    70s, 80s, 90s (In this case the music is sorted by decades)
    …
    Then for stuff that I need to know when it came out(in this case I need to know what is the latest)
    DEEP HOUSE > 2015/2014/2013/… > song
    PoP > 2015/2014/2013/… > song
    …
    and the “Pièce De Résistance” would be adding this folder structure to SERATO, then create Playlists with the songs I know I’ll play the most and insert them as subcrates…

    May 13, 2015 at 2:44 pm #2193521
    DJ Vintage
    Moderator

    Hi Douglas, folder organising is so … well … 90s ! LOL 😀

    May 13, 2015 at 2:50 pm #2193561
    Douglas Budde
    Participant

    Hehehe…I know, but as I said, its personal…thats how I like things organized… A place for everything and everything in its place…;)

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