I use folders for my music….Is there a better way?

Hey Dave, you youngster!

I am 52 and have been DJ-ing for 38 years. I am living prove that you CAN teach an old dog new tricks.

For the longest time I have been an avid … uhm … disliker (for hate is such a strong emotion) of iTunes. But I have started to move in the iTunes direction (big thanks to Phil Morse in the Digital DJ Masterclass which is reopening shortly) and am better off for it.

Your current Folders (80s, 90s and such) can migrate to either the genre field or two another field in iTunes which can hold as many keywords as you want in there. Smart playlists can easily create a lists on any set of criteria you can come up with. The rating system can be used for energy levels (you don’t need the rating, if it’s not a 5-star track it shouldn’t be in your collection to begin with).

I have started tuning down my collection too. Also a mobile DJ I like having a big pile of tracks to find requests in. But I have split my stuff in two, my request collection just sits on my external hard disk, with a couple of main folders for compilation series and the rest in A through Z on artists first name. I can use the file explorer in my DJ software to find something there. My core collection will end up being somewhere in the 1.000-1.500 tracks range and fully prepared in iTunes.

It may take a bit of “courage” to let go of the traditional way of organizing, but at the end of the day it makes your work a whole lot easier.

Everyone has their own system – here’s what works for me.

I use iTunes, which is my main library management software. I import tracks into iTunes first when I get them (or buy them through iTunes). iTunes stores my whole collection and organises it for me – it stores it in folders by artist, then album. (EG. Adele’s 21 Album has the file path “M:/Music/Adele/21”)

That means that I don’t have to do all that manually.. I don’t use Mixed In Key/Platinum Notes personally.

I then organise all my music by genre/bpm by putting everything into playlists (making sure the ID3 tags are correct – mainly changing genre as I go and inputting bpm. My DJ software (Virtual DJ) then reads the iTunes library and I copy the folders over into VDJ as I then have greater flexibility (VDJ cannot edit iTunes playlists) over what is in each folder…

Then i head out to play 🙂

bob6397

Hello there! I have a question, with so many songs out there, doesn’t iTunes take up valuable memory in your laptop? I guess I just don’t understand how I can use iTunes for my music library…

Big Chile: I’d make a topic for this.. You don’t need to have every song in existence on your hard drive (that would be pretty much impossible and rather expensive). I have just under 4000 tracks in total in my library. Of those, I probably play 400. NOw, I only started my regular gig back in September and so I am still setting up my collection, but even DJs who do pretty much the same as me but who have been doing it for years only have a core collection of around 600 tracks – even though the rest of their collection in the tens of thousands in order to deal with all the (very varied) requests that you can get.

Using iTunes for your music is something that you have to do from the start, when you first build your collection – if you don’t, it’s going to take you a very long time to rebuild everything using iTunes afterwards when you realise that you want to use it..

iTunes manages everything for you – where the songs are stores, the metadata to a certain extent and (most importantly) it has the ability for smart playlists. These let iTunes create lists of tracks according to their year/genre/artist/bpm etc. This is so useful.. 🙂

bob6397

Yeah.. it’s the only issue with Digital DJing… Everything does work really well once you have it sorted though – an idea might be to import it all as is – iTunes will then let you edit the tags on multiple tracks at a time (for instance if a whole album is the same genre) – and don’t put the BPM’s in yourself – this will do it for most tracks for you (run it before importing into iTunes) – saves loads of time..

Genre is always the hardest one – it is nearly always wrong in iTunes and I have corrected everyone manually.. But, again, figuring out ways of doing it multiple tracks at a time will be easier (for example, create a plyslist manually for each genre, just dumping all the tracks in as you go. Then, once you are done, highlight all the tracks and change the genre field for all of them at once – don’t change anything else though!)

I will say again though – make sure you have a backup 🙂

Hope that helps..

bob6397

As for genres, there is only one correct list of genres … your OWN!

It helps nothing to tag all your tracks as house, if you are a house-only DJ. By the same token it doesn’t really help if you use 12 sub-genres of house if you are an allround DJ. And if all you do is play 80s disco parties, your are gonna need a different set of genres rather than just 80s disco.

Well, you get the drift. So please, don’t worry about whatever tag/genre is given to a track by whatever software. Listen and decide what YOU want to call it.

The other thing I can’t stress enough, is to NOT let anything into your collection (iTunes) that is not a core track that you expect to be playing a lot. That way you don’t have “bad” or “lesser” tracks in your collection. Every track is there for a reason and is fully playable.

I haven’t managed to get rid of them (and I’ve been sort of looking for 6 months now) but they don’t bother me too much – before I go out to play, I use the Virtual folders to create set-lists for that individual event and then work from those during the vent.. I avoid using the iTunes integration when DJing due to all the clutter (and because you can’t edit the playlists in VDJ)

bob6397