Organising your music best practices

[Hammer]

Guys, I have a couple of dilemmas, some have been going on for a while, some are new.

Let's start with the first, most important one.

Dilemma 1 ORGANISING MUSIC for DJing via iTunes.
To begin with, if it helps anyone else. I stumbled on this video the other day and it sums up the place I want to get to perfectly. He's made excellent use of Smart Playlists to keep his main genres organised. The whole lot is set to sync with Traktor and everything was imported into the Traktor Collection. I also loved his bit about using tick boxes to consider the tracks retired.


In addition to this though I feel I want to make life easier here.

Enter Beatport Pro. Now, I know that Beatport Pro (Mac) has a system in which it can compare the tracks with those found on Beatport's database. This is great for adding keys and ensuring artwork is correct; also this helps for all those tracks converted over from FLAC to lossless i.e Bandcamp. However what I cannot seem to work out is how I go about keeping iTunes and Beatport Pro in sync.

I want to be able to open Beatport Pro, analyze either new or existing tracks/playlists, ensure the details are all correct, update the metadata (Genre,Mood,Key etc), hit a button, go back to iTunes and it look fresh.
Am I looking at it the right way? What needs to happen at the last stage of Beatport Pro, all I keep getting is separate XML files and confused.

Can anyone share some wisdom?


Dilemma 2: My second dilemma is more of a mindset adjustment to work with the new Apple Music/iTunes solution.

In the past I just downloaded everything from JunoDownload/Beatport/Bandcamp/Boomkat and others and kept it all in iTunes. Kept all my playlists up to date and when I hit the club, open Traktor, check the iTunes folder and away I went.
Moving forward, with the times I guess I need to rethink my formula.
With the introduction of Apple Music, it's an obvious choice to occasionally add tracks to my library for quick listening on my iPhone or Mac. This works fine until I DJ and suddenly the tracks are not available.

I feel the best way I can go about this will be to create a Smart Playlist with the rules:
'If track location is Apple Music.'
AND
'Track is stored in Playlist XYZ (My DJ Playlists)'

Then when it comes to performing, I ensure I check the list and get a proper copy of each track.
If anyone is doing this any different, I'd be happy to hear about it.


Finally,

Dilemma 3: DJ Mixes.

Times are changing here too, with the decline of Soundcloud it has been made very clear that if I want to be able to listen back to excellent mixes for years to come, I cannot rely on an audio streaming service. At any point it may go and take all of the good content with it.
So over time I've been saving my favourite DJ Mixes to my library, tagging them with 'mixed' or 'DJ Mix' and keeping them for later listening.

However, listening to those mixes on your iPhone nowadays is a very hard task.
With the introduction of iCloud Music Library, all tracks are now automatically sent to the cloud and then made available to your iDevice. Great for tracks but not so great for mixes. Uploads have a time length limit of I think 1 hr. Meaning all of the typical 2-hour mixes cannot be uploaded.
Transferring them to your iPhone via cable is also out of the question as when making use of iCloud Music Library you only can have one or the other. You cannot manually transfer music files without turning off the feature of allowing you to access your cloud-stored files. So annoying.

Has anyone else experience this and have a workaround?

[Patch]

You're gonna run into issues trying to use Beatport Pro, Traktor and iTunes. That's a total of 3 "library" (NML/XML) files.

Previously, I've only ever browsed from the iTunes Node in Traktor - but this guy seems to have a pretty flawless way of having this Traktor Collection reflect his (dynamic) Smart Playlists. I need to look into that further.

The first issue that comes to mind, is that if you make changes to the tags of a music file OUTSIDE of iTunes, you actually have to play the file (or right-click>get info) for that information to be available in iTunes. This means that any Smart Playlists that you create WILL NOT AUTOUPDATE with tracks that have had tags altered outside of iTunes. This is a HUGE flaw in iTunes, and I really hate that it works that way.

The workaround for that is to make importing the prepared tracks into iTunes THE LAST THING YOU DO. Then, the iTunes Node in Traktor will reflect all of the changes to the iTunes Library.

This is fine if you are starting fresh - but if you have an existing music collection that you plan on updating, I would delete your entire iTunes Collection, then update your tags outside of Traktor, then re-import the newly updated tracks into Traktor.

[rob2192]

My personal approach is to have 2 collections, one for Djing and one for everything else.
In terms of organsing the DJ collection I am eagerly awating RekordBuddy 2: bpm-2015-rekord-buddy-2/

[astromech]

I jut do my music management in Traktor. Import, grid and catalogue.

[Patch]

What do you mean by "catalogue"?

[astromech]

What do you mean by "catalogue"?

I add keywords to the comments section, ensure the meta data is accurate then file them in the correct playlists.

[keithace]

part of me feels bad for not being as organized as some of you...

[Patch]

It's not for everyone.

It can seriously eat into your actual mixing time. 👎🏻

[Patch]

Happydan - nice system you've got there! But if you did it in iTunes prior to importing into Traktor, you could use Smart Playlists and browse/load from the iTunes Node in Traktor...

But from the sounds of it, I imagine that you have a reason for not doing that...

[keithace]

It's not for everyone.

It can seriously eat into your actual mixing time. ����

Even though I rarely play out anymore, I am pretty ruthless about moving tracks in and out of rotation. Tracks sound "dated" to me pretty quickly.