Selecting and deselecting is very important part of how you organize your music. Always start by selecting the best tracks you have, the ones you never leave home without. The ones that would make you quit playing if couldn’t bring them. The ones you know makes the night every time you play them. Set a number, like 200 tracks, if you play sub genres. These tracks will be the foundation of your sets. Don’t use more tags than what you need when searching for something, and learn the tracks you have. Personally I have the tonality and the BPM in the filename, sometimes also tagged in the the comments.
I’ve almost stopped using genres and instead I use groupings, like DJ Vintage suggested. It’s more useful. Depending on how much your gigs differentiates from each other, you can have a couple of groupings for each part of the night. Background, warm up, build up, peak hour, after hours. Start taking your 200 tracks and group them like this and then set a limit to each folder/playlist to something like a 100 tracks. Now you can see where you have enough, more than enough and where you need to add some tracks.
When you add new genres to your sets, this is a way to easy maintaining a growing collection and you learn where your best tracks are, always. Sometimes you end up needing tracks from different genres and this make it easy to have like one soulful vocal warmup side by side with a melodic deep minimal warmup. They sound perfect on their own but also together done right, and you can flow between them and get into the next phase with the right sub genre that’s right for each night.
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