Originally Posted by
KevinJames
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!
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