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Thread: Rekordbox help needed

  1. #1
    Member steveryan's Avatar
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    Rekordbox help needed

    I'm getting used to Rekordbox and it's basic features but it seems I'm clearly doing something wrong with track organization.

    When I buy a bunch of tracks, the first thing I do is drag them (From Traxsource, Juno or wherever) into a folder on my desktop called "Track Holding". It's meant to be a temporary place for the tracks to sit before I move them into their main genre folders located inside another desktop folder called "All Tracks". Inside "All tracks" is many folders for various genre and a couple other folders for oddball tracks that don't really seem to fit into any of the other folders.

    Now keep in mind, within each genre folder there are hundreds of tracks. So, I don't want to just drag these new tracks straight from Traxsource into their proper genre folder. Those folders are organized alphabetically, so the new track will just get buried among hundreds of other tracks where I won't be able to quickly find them. Hence the need for "Track Holding".

    After I drag the new tracks into Track Holding, I open Rekordbox, locate Track Holding and import it as a playlist. By doing this, it automatically analyzes every track. Then, I go through each track and place some basic hot cue points that I actually just use as mix-in and mix-out indicators. It's kinda complicated, but I don't use hot cues in the traditional sense. They're just there to tell me where the mix point begins and when the track is coming to an end.

    After I get all those tracks marked up with hot cues, I then move each track into a genre folder in Rekordbox and I also move the tracks from the desktop "Track Holding" folder into their proper genre folders inside "All Tracks." The genre folders in Rekordbox are all named the same as the genre folders on my desktop in "All Tracks". So if a track is in Deep House in Rekordbox, it can also be found in Deep House on my desktop within "All Tracks".

    Here in lies the problem.

    When I'm done with all this, I have to empty the contents of "Track Holding", because I'm going to buy more tracks in a few days. I need that folder to be empty. When I empty that folder though, Rekordbox no longer plays the tracks. This, of course, is because I deleted the track from it's original location. So then, I have to use the relocate feature in Rekordbox to find all those missing tracks.

    Obviously, this is a pain in the ass and probably not the way in which Rekordbox was intended to be used.

    If I could put the tracks in their proper genre folder in the first place, this wouldn't be happening. I'd just locate them in Rekordbox and drag em into their correct Rekordbox playlist genre folder.

    What exactly am I not doing correctly?
    Last edited by steveryan; 11-28-2018 at 01:18 AM.

  2. #2
    Member steveryan's Avatar
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  3. #3
    What if you just put all tracks in one music folder and make it the Recordbox collection? Then use playlists in RB to create lists of tracks by genre. When you add new tracks to the collection, I believe RB will put them at the end. You can go there to prep the tracks, and then add them to the appropriate genre playlists. So once you add the tracks to the one music folder and the RB collection, they never move, but they can be associated with one or more genre or other playlists.

    During your prep work, if you make sure all the tracks have the right genre in your genre naming scheme, then even if you don't have a genre playlist, you can still pull up all the tracks in a genre with the search function.

    I've done this all along with Traktor and I'm only now starting in on Recordbox, so I'm speaking from limited RB experience, and the above may not work exactly as suggested. But maybe it'll give you some useful ideas and you could do some experimenting to see what works best for you.

  4. #4
    Member steveryan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Waterbeat View Post
    What if you just put all tracks in one music folder and make it the Recordbox collection? Then use playlists in RB to create lists of tracks by genre. When you add new tracks to the collection, I believe RB will put them at the end. You can go there to prep the tracks, and then add them to the appropriate genre playlists. So once you add the tracks to the one music folder and the RB collection, they never move, but they can be associated with one or more genre or other playlists.

    During your prep work, if you make sure all the tracks have the right genre in your genre naming scheme, then even if you don't have a genre playlist, you can still pull up all the tracks in a genre with the search function.

    I've done this all along with Traktor and I'm only now starting in on Recordbox, so I'm speaking from limited RB experience, and the above may not work exactly as suggested. But maybe it'll give you some useful ideas and you could do some experimenting to see what works best for you.
    Those are great ideas man. I wasn't sure how to use the collection area and didn't even realize I could drag tracks directly into RB. I thought I had to navigate to them from the left side panel. Now that you mention it, using the collection is definitely the way to go. I can give the tracks genre names the same as my playlist folders. Should do some tagging as well.

    Since I like to have the tracks saved in at least one other place (The desktop), I'll just have to drag em from Traxsource or Juno again. No biggie.

    RB has a lot of features. Some of the basic stuff I haven't wrapped my brain around yet.

    Thanks a lot bro. Problem solved.

  5. #5
    Here's a pretty good video about importing tracks into Recordbox. It's cleaner if all your tracks are in one music folder. If you add new tracks to that folder and import it again, RB is smart enough to figure out which ones are new and only process those instead of starting over.

  6. #6
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    Everyone has their own preferences for how they prefer to manage their tracks, but I will share mine which may or may not be of value to you.

    I store all of my tracks on a 2 TB external drive. Within Rekordbox, I have main play lists tiled by year, and then within each play list I have folders for each main genre. As an example this is what my play lists would look like:

    Playlists:
    2018
    Deep House
    Mellow House
    Funky House
    Funky Tech House
    Tech House
    Acid House
    2017
    2016
    2015
    Classic Tracks

    My CDJ USB Sticks mirror this setup exactly as well.

    I update the genre on all of my tracks to custom sub-genres to further refine based on specific sounds/moods before putting them in the main genre folders and this is key for me. These sub-genre's are classifications that only need to make sense to me, nobody else. This works best for me because when I'm playing I'm really looking more for tracks with a specific mood or sound, I'm not necessarily looking for a specific track title. For example within my Deep House folder, I would have tracks categorized as "Deep Duby House", "Deep Atmospheric House", "Deep Funky House", "Deep Soulful House". While in my Tech House folder I would have tracks labeled as "Deep UK Tech", "Dark Moody Tech" "Dirty Acid Tech" "Dirty Duby Tech". Again, these classifications wouldn't mean anything to anyone else, but for me they each relate to a specific sound or mood and I know them inside and out which makes track selection super easy for me when I play.

    When I purchase tracks these are the steps I go through to get tracks ready to play.

    1. Download tracks from Traxsource to my dropbox which is super fast.
    2. Create a new sub-folder titled by date on my external, inside of my main folder titled "DJ Tracks for Rekordbox". This way I can track all of my music in batches based on when I purchased it. Helpful If I decide later to move my music to a new external and need to use the track locator function it will be super fast to find any specific tracks I need to locate.
    3. Cut and paste the new tracks from my dropbox into the new sub-folder on the external drive.
    4. Import the new sub-folder into Rekordbox, making sure tracks in my collection are sorted from newest to oldest top to bottom (you can achieve this by clicking on the date added column header and it will switch back and forth between newest to oldest and vice versa).
    5. Once the tracks have been added to the collection, I set my cue points, update the genre to my own custom sub-genre's, add a color code based on energy level, and I also change the release date to the date I purchased the track originally. While the last one isn't really needed, you can't change the "Date Added" field, so I change the release date instead which helps if I'm importing large amounts of old tracks, such as when I first started with Rekordbox.
    6. Then I move each track into it's respective main genre folder inside the Play Lists, and right click the column headers and select "re-number tracks". This ensures in each folder the newest tracks are at the top and oldest at the bottom.
    7. I then export all of the new tracks from my collection to my USB stick which has the same playlist/sub-folder setup as Rekordbox, and again I renumber the tracks in each sub-folder so newest tracks are at the top of each folder.

    I also have my device preferences set so that genre is displayed next to track title when I am browsing tracks on the CDJ's. When I play, I generally browse by play list and the main genre folders within each play list. This way I can see the tracks in each genre folder ordered with newest at the top and with my custom sub-genres next to the track name so I know exactly what sound or mood each track has.

    That's my process. Hopefully at least some parts of it are helpful to you, but it really depends what is important to you. For me what is important is to be able to arrange my tracks by specific sound/mood and by date from newest to oldest

    Anyways, hope that helps!

  7. #7
    Member steveryan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by KevinJames View Post
    Everyone has their own preferences for how they prefer to manage their tracks, but I will share mine which may or may not be of value to you.

    I store all of my tracks on a 2 TB external drive. Within Rekordbox, I have main play lists tiled by year, and then within each play list I have folders for each main genre. As an example this is what my play lists would look like:

    Playlists:
    2018
    Deep House
    Mellow House
    Funky House
    Funky Tech House
    Tech House
    Acid House
    2017
    2016
    2015
    Classic Tracks

    My CDJ USB Sticks mirror this setup exactly as well.

    I update the genre on all of my tracks to custom sub-genres to further refine based on specific sounds/moods before putting them in the main genre folders and this is key for me. These sub-genre's are classifications that only need to make sense to me, nobody else. This works best for me because when I'm playing I'm really looking more for tracks with a specific mood or sound, I'm not necessarily looking for a specific track title. For example within my Deep House folder, I would have tracks categorized as "Deep Duby House", "Deep Atmospheric House", "Deep Funky House", "Deep Soulful House". While in my Tech House folder I would have tracks labeled as "Deep UK Tech", "Dark Moody Tech" "Dirty Acid Tech" "Dirty Duby Tech". Again, these classifications wouldn't mean anything to anyone else, but for me they each relate to a specific sound or mood and I know them inside and out which makes track selection super easy for me when I play.

    When I purchase tracks these are the steps I go through to get tracks ready to play.

    1. Download tracks from Traxsource to my dropbox which is super fast.
    2. Create a new sub-folder titled by date on my external, inside of my main folder titled "DJ Tracks for Rekordbox". This way I can track all of my music in batches based on when I purchased it. Helpful If I decide later to move my music to a new external and need to use the track locator function it will be super fast to find any specific tracks I need to locate.
    3. Cut and paste the new tracks from my dropbox into the new sub-folder on the external drive.
    4. Import the new sub-folder into Rekordbox, making sure tracks in my collection are sorted from newest to oldest top to bottom (you can achieve this by clicking on the date added column header and it will switch back and forth between newest to oldest and vice versa).
    5. Once the tracks have been added to the collection, I set my cue points, update the genre to my own custom sub-genre's, add a color code based on energy level, and I also change the release date to the date I purchased the track originally. While the last one isn't really needed, you can't change the "Date Added" field, so I change the release date instead which helps if I'm importing large amounts of old tracks, such as when I first started with Rekordbox.
    6. Then I move each track into it's respective main genre folder inside the Play Lists, and right click the column headers and select "re-number tracks". This ensures in each folder the newest tracks are at the top and oldest at the bottom.
    7. I then export all of the new tracks from my collection to my USB stick which has the same playlist/sub-folder setup as Rekordbox, and again I renumber the tracks in each sub-folder so newest tracks are at the top of each folder.

    I also have my device preferences set so that genre is displayed next to track title when I am browsing tracks on the CDJ's. When I play, I generally browse by play list and the main genre folders within each play list. This way I can see the tracks in each genre folder ordered with newest at the top and with my custom sub-genres next to the track name so I know exactly what sound or mood each track has.

    That's my process. Hopefully at least some parts of it are helpful to you, but it really depends what is important to you. For me what is important is to be able to arrange my tracks by specific sound/mood and by date from newest to oldest

    Anyways, hope that helps!
    When you put the tracks onto your external in the sub folder, do you ever move those tracks from that sub folder into another folder on your external? No genre folders on the external?

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by steveryan View Post
    When you put the tracks onto your external in the sub folder, do you ever move those tracks from that sub folder into another folder on your external? No genre folders on the external?
    No, I do not ever move the tracks to a different folder on my external because 1) that causes problems with Rekordbox, and 2) I don't really have a need to or see the point in doing so.

    And no, I do not set up genre folders on my external. I don't have a need or see the point in this either because my external is nothing more than a storage place for the actual files. All of my music on my external is in folders sorted by the date I purchased it. This way if I ever do transfer the music to another location such as a new external drive, I can easily find any specif track in order to use the track locator function and re-link all of my music to my Rekordbox library.

    I manage all of my music inside of Rekordbox, so my genre folders are sub-folders inside of my playlists which are sorted by year purchased. I have it set up this way as I understand that when individual play lists get too big (too many tracks) it starts causing problems. If not for that, I would just have the genre folders as the playlists, but then each genre folder would get very big with potentially 1,000 tracks or more and I worry that would cause problems. So setting up the play lists by year with subfolders for the genre folders keeps each sub-folder to a few hundred tracks each and it works very smoothly.

    Keep in mind, everyone has their own preferences/needs and therefor will need to figure out a workflow that works best for them. It is important to really think things through carefully to make sure that your chosen workflow addresses all of your needs from end to end, including how and where you store your master files, how you manage and sort your music inside Rekordbox, and what information you want to see on your CDJ's/XDJ's ect. to make browsing or searching for tracks easiest for you when you play.

    It is equally important to understand the limitations of your hardware and software and how those limitations may effect or cause problems with your chosen workflow. Moving music to a different folder on your external once you have imported it into Rekordbox is one of those issues... Rekordbox does not like that and it will absolutely cause you problems.

    For someone just getting started with Rekordbox I would HIGHLY recommend starting slow and testing things out thoroughly before importing an entire library. Think your process through, import maybe 100 tracks, process them, and export to your USB stick or whatever device your playing from, and test EVERYTHING. Make sure it all works exactly as you want with zero issues. The last thing you want to do is find out there are problems with your process/workflow after you have imported an entire library and processed thousands of tracks, only to find out there are problems with your process and you may need to rethink it and start over. from zero.... that would SUCK. HARD.
    Last edited by KevinJames; 12-15-2018 at 10:49 AM.

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