Organizing library

Hello!

I'm all new to digital DJing with Traktor Pro and have an issue...
To start of: I'm using Mac.
I'm trying to organize all my old tracks and new tracks but don't know where to start and what to think of. I've been reading around a bit but can't deside whats best for me and I don't wanna start all over after a few weeks of organizing just because I realize that the way I've done it wont fit my needs.

First of I'm thinking about wether to sort the tracks thru itunes or in folders... Or maybe both?! (You may say that iTunes does the folder-thing for me when i import the tracks to the itunes library, but i currently have that turned of.)

There are a few things that i have in mind while i plan this:

• I got alot of music and i just use about 50% of the tracks for DJing
• I would like to be able to sync my iPhone/iPod with all my music somehow. Doesnt matter wether its via iTunes or any other App.

I really like to make mixtapes in playlists in iTunes so the music must go thru iTunes, but I does'nt nessesearly need to use the full iTunes-library in Traktor, instead import tracks that I'll use to the Traktor Library.

How do you organize your tracks and librarys and which programs should i have to give me the Key and BPM etc.?
I'm pretty much interested in hearing everything you got when it comes to sorting and organizing your tracks!

PS. Sorry for my bad english, hope you'll understand!

Cheers!

There are a series of really good articles on the site - I use a few of them, and it really helps with avoiding 'tunes blindness'.

Get iTunes to organise you music, and use genre tagging, key tagging and star ratings alongside some smart playlists and you'll be fine.

http://www.djtechtools.com/2008/12/0...es-power-tips/

http://www.djtechtools.com/2008/12/1...wer-tips-pt-2/

http://www.djtechtools.com/2009/03/1...r-tips-part-3/

http://www.djtechtools.com/2009/09/2...r-tips-part-4/

i use smart playlists in itunes. i have one for all new tracks which i always load on my iphone. i rate the songs on the go. since i had a pile of unrated tracks when i started this that i still havent worked off, i also have a smart playlist with all unrated songs that i also partially sync with my iphone. so that if i am feeling like rating a lot of songs on the go i can continue with these older unrated tracks once i have worked through the new unrated songs.

i then also have a smart playlist for untagged songs (i tag songs in categories by adding stuff in the grouping field). i then create smart playlists from these tags.

you can find more details here:
http://ifnotwhynot.me/getting-myself-organized

the quick tags tool i use unfortunately is unmaintained, so all the caveats i mention in that blog post still exist. :(

I've started sorting everything out now. I do it this way:

• In my root music-folder I made a folder named DJ and put all the artists I knew I was going to use for DJing. I named every map just by artistname for now. (ROOT>DJ>ARTIST>"tracks and folders for full albums"]
• Now i was left with alot of singletracks and randomremixes and so forth. So I added all music, EXCEPT the DJ-folder i just made, to my iTunes-library and removed every track that I knew I don't was going to use for DJing. This left me with about 800 tracks.
• Just because my music was so unorganized from the beginning I had no clue were this musics exact position were so I were forced to rightcklick the tracks and press "View in Finder" and then drag it to its new location in ROOT>DJ>ARTIST.

This is where I am now, I've sorted every single track I got to either a map called DJ or left it in my rootfolder. In my DJ folder I have this structure:
DJ>ARTIST
My next step is to put genres in my DJ-folder and then sort in my artists there. But i still got a question though... Do you think its worth to put a folder to every single artist even though you just got like one track with that artist? The alternative solution is to put these tracks just under ROOT>DJ>GENRE (instead of ROOT>DJ>GENRE>ARTIST).
When I've done this I should start adding the ID3 tags, but more update on that later :D

Do you guys think this is the best way to do it or am I just messing everything up?

does anyone find that if you open a song in Traktor first then windows media player can't read the information properly?

I think i'm going to set up the whole smart playlist thing in iTunes it looked usefull, just wish my ipod had more storage, hand picking the songs to put on it is a right ordeal