Traktor DJs… How do you organise your music? (I'm having problems)

I’m having the same exact problem. My files are scattered randomly across my external hard drive and there are just folders everywhere that I have to click and even lists of folders inside of folders that are in lists of folders. It’s like folder inception and there’s almost no organization at all. On top of that, I have way too much music to manage.

I’m on a MAC and I’ve learned to do everything in iTunes. I’ve created smart lists by genre, BMP, artists, mood, styles etc. I can create mini-playlists in iTunes and practice them in Traktor. No problems!! I can then take that list and make playlists and collections within Traktor etc.

“Eg. I am looking at a song in the iTunes playlist integrated with Traktor and it shows a value of 0.000 in the BPM field. I find the same song in the Track collection and there is a value of 140.245 BPM. I then load the track into deck 1 and the BPM is analyzed as 140.010 BPM.”

This happens when I don’t properly analyze my music. What I’ve learned to do is use Mixed in Key to find the BPM and Key of the song. It updates the source file’s tags. So when I load the song in iTunes or Traktor the info is the same. It’s not perfect but it gets it right better than 90% of the time.

Definitely better than 40%. I’ve compared the BPM Traktor gives you with BPM of a track I’ve put through MIK. And it’s pretty accurate. As for the key analysis it is pretty bang on but not perfect. I have had situations where I’ve put two tracks together in the same key and they don’t sound good at all. I don’t think Traktor does key analysis. For the money, and the amount of music I have it has saved me a ton of time.

The first step to having an organised files sytem is your drive, keep it in order, have a back drive/s and always leave some space free. The free space if for if you ever want to move folder around from one drive to another. If your drive is organised it make importing tracks a breeze. My folder struture on the drive goes: Genre > Import year/month/week. as I download music once a week so an e.g. would be Tech House> 2012 Oct 1. Once it on the drive I just drag the folder in to the RekordBox playlist for that genre which, will also add them to the main collection, for anaylse it BPM and Key then add comments and ratings. From there I can create playlist for mix sets. Also all my drive are formatted to FAT32 so I can use them on both Windows and Mac.
I’ve worked on getting a system that works for me and I’ve changed it several times but now I think I’ve got it to be whats best for my needs, everyone will have their own preferences.

If you using Traktor and Itunes you need to remember that after analysing your tracks in Traktor to make sure your saving the info to the tags then reload the tag info in Itunes so it will show the BPM as per the Traktor analyse. The issue you have with the star rating is due to the different ID3 tag versions of each programe,

iTunes does have the ability to convert ID3 tags to a different version, up to v2.4. You can do this by right-clicking the track and choosing “Convert ID3 Tags. If the tag data is definately there but isn’t showing up you could try changing the ID3 tag version. v2.4 is standard for Traktor

Camelot is easy as it’s like a clock you work around. I got a platter cover with it on as I thought it look good : )