Collection cleaning?

[bigbeatzz]

I have it sorted by genre so its not that tough. It was tougher when I had 10k of vinyl! I narrowed that collection to about 1000 of pure amazing tracks. When it comes to music I really have a great memory. I've been playing apabout 21 years so 5000 tracks is not really that much. When I play I pack a playlist of about 100 for 3 hours.

[Bl4ck3n3D]

I've got about 1000 tracks going on in my collection right now. They're separated in Itunes by the date I bought/downloaded them. I think its about time to clean up the list, especially as the new year approaches.

The only thing is though, it's hard to depart with old tracks. I tend to play a mix of techno, house, and tribal so having a good amount of songs to choose from is good, but also time consuming.

How do I force myself to clean my selection up? I don't want my selection to grow to the size of 6K like the poster above me, that is ridiculous. However, I also want a decent sized pool of songs so I can play techno, house, or some other genre if I wanted.

[bigbeatzz]

How do I force myself to clean my selection up? I don't want my selection to grow to the size of 6K like the poster above me, that is ridiculous. However, I also want a decent sized pool of songs so I can play techno, house, or some other genre if I wanted.

Not so rediculous to me , I have heat ready for any situtation. My house collection is about half of it. Ive been playing house since 1993! I accumulated a ton of promos when I was playing every week.

[Bl4ck3n3D]

Not so rediculous to me , I have heat ready for any situtation. My house collection is about half of it. Ive been playing house since 1993! I accumulated a ton of promos when I was playing every week.

I'd be losing myself and pulling hairs going through that much music, but that's just me. I feel overwhelmed at a little over 1K.

[frijec]

Having 6k tracks is way out of my comfort zone to be quite honest. I think I just got past 400 tracks, and that's even too much for what I want and the type of DJ I am. This is mainly a hobby for me, and I have maybe one or two gigs a month tops. So then I really want to streamline my sound and not just be another one in the flok with the exact same collection as anyone else.
For the record I play mostly darker sounding deep house into borderline dub techno.

When I do my shopping I use Beatler/Beatport Pro for the digital and Juno for vinyl, and I rarely buy tracks instantly. So when I find a good bunch of tracks I really like, I tend to leave them in the crate for a week or so and revisit them to see if I'm still down with them.

Anyways, I like the thinking of rating tracks by stars and then filtering out the lowest rated over time. A proper listen through would be needed to start such a system

Thanks for all the experiences and suggestions! Much appreciated.

[mostapha]

Yeah…actually, I have around 8,000 tracks in my archives. I just don't spin with anywhere near all of it. I couldn't imagine it.

Then again, I've never been a mobile DJ. If you're spinning sweet 16s, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, retirement parties, corporate events, and all the other crap people want a mobile DJ for…I could see you needing an absolute shit-ton of music.

Granted, I have yet to hear a mobile DJ do anything as far as the actual "performance" goes that couldn't be accomplished with iTunes, but just having that much music and making sure it's all playable is definitely something. It's just not what I want to do.

[frijec]

I gave it a good run and took me maybe 4 hours to just listen through most if and decide wether to keep it or not. All in all I think I got rid of maybe 1/3 or half of my collection, as it just doesn't fit my taste anymore or was acquired on a poor reason.

I'm quite happy with the end result and can only encourage others to bust out the trashcan and get rid of the useless content.

[Grifff]

I have about 450 songs in my iTunes library currently, I have been going on random deletion sprees where I would delete 5 or 6 tracks at a time for the past couple of weeks.

Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff is pretty annoying, but well worth it

[MiL0]

I have just under 1600 tunes in my 'current' folders which is stuff I have specifically saved / categorised. God knows how many I've got in my archives and on my file server...

I use "Locate32" and "Everything" to track down tunes - can't stand iTunes search.

[newg]

I have around 18000 tracks in my library and I'm constantly lost for what to play next.

I have numerous small sets and playlists saved in serato, some in traktor, many with overlapping tracks, and poor names.

My entire library is a complete mess.

I'd love to say it just works for me, but honestly I feel completely lost most of the time. I'm seriously considering relegating my entire library to my backup drive and starting from scratch, only taking across the tunes I want and need into my v2 library. The mammoth-ness of this undertaking is seriously offputting though. I'd love to have a slim, manicured library, but it's probably just an impossibility for me.