Music organisation tips please!

[MDU]

Now i've got my controller all set up and ready to mix but my tracks are all over the place. I have albums, singles, part tracks all in one messy folder on my laptop and a few more folders on several USB sticks. The aim is to use one 1Tb usb HD with all or most my music on it.

The majority of my music is trance, techno or house (and any variation of!) .

Just wanted everyone's best tips for sorting my music out? Hopefully only have to do this once and do it right and then keep adding to it!

BPM? If BPM then how to decide what range of BPM to go for?

Type of music? (i.e. trance in one folder, house in the other, etc etc)

Is it worth renaming tracks in a particular way to make DJing easier and faster?

Thanks

[Waterbeat]

You didn't say what software you are using. But if it has a good search capability, then your music could all be in one folder as long as the Genre, BPM, Key and maybe some descriptive comment is in the all the tracks. You can then use the search to select subsets by genre, then sort by BPM or Key. If you play with the search and sort, you'll see the possibilities.

[MDU]

You didn't say what software you are using. But if it has a good search capability, then your music could all be in one folder as long as the Genre, BPM, Key and maybe some descriptive comment is in the all the tracks. You can then use the search to select subsets by genre, then sort by BPM or Key. If you play with the search and sort, you'll see the possibilities.

Ah yes. Sorry.

Using Traktor pro 2 and also been messing about with Virtual DJ too. I think its all down to personal preference from what i've read up huh. It's gotta work for me not just do what someone else has done.

Play around - learn - play around some more - learn some more - repeat and master! Right?

[ryandenis_]

Hey there MDU,

I sort my music by genre and vibe. I mostly mix techno, melodic techno, deep house (sometimes), and tech house. So my crates are labeled as such. I use these crates as huge filters for genres. Then what I also do is make playlists every couple of weeks or so of 100 of my favorite tracks (I use these playlists for my mixes I record). Typically when putting together these playlists I like to imagine a feeling or emotion that I want to invoke with the sounds/set. Then I add whatever tracks I think fit that emotion.

BPM for me isn't super important to filter my tracks because most of my tracks are 120-130 bpm and within a set it is fairly easy to gradually increase or decrease bpm (it's just riskier to jump from 6+ BPM).

How are you buying your tracks? I purchase all of mine off of beatport.com so I don't have to rename them. But if you need to I would rename them as you purchase/acquire the tracks - that way you don't have to do it all in bulk (that can be overwhelming).

Hope this helps and good luck to you in this very fun hobby!

[MDU]

Thank you kindly.

My kinda DJ! My kinda music! Pretty much the same but i also like my trance too!

Most of my tracks I have CD rips or downloads so the names are not consistent (yet!). Liking the sound of beatport though. Uniform naming I guess so its all the same in your library.

Great tips - i already began by sort of doing the same thing by chance... I made 3 folders and put in the tracks I wanted to make a DJ set from (put in around 20 tracks) even if i wanted to make a 10 track set and just played around with what sounded best. Not had much time over the past week or two as I've been busy with work but I did make a quick snippet of a track on FL studio.

[mitchiemasha]

Tag&Rename software... It's well worth learning how it's string works to rename your files how you want them. We go Artist - Title (remix). All the other info isn't visible in the title but is in the TAG. It's amazing at tidying up huge folders, removing info you don't want etc.

I have a separate albums folder and a singles folder. The singles folder has a folder for each year, 90's being all in 1 combined. Everything else is handle inside the DJ Software.

Having lots of individual folders is annoying, especially when going back through a year to clean up.