Cleaning out the Music closet.

[emil_brikha]

When I took up DJing again after several years of pausing, I just went bonkers and downloaded a shitload of songs. Then sometimes I'd get booked for a themed party and I'd download a bunch of stuff and slowly it grew to a musical library of over 9000 songs.

Honestly, most of them I never use, have never used and probably will never use so one day I was inspired by, I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who one day decided to throw away all of, or most of his jokes and routines and start working on new fresh material.

I came to a similar point in my DJ career as well.

The first thing I did was to download Duplicate Cleaner. I'm assuming I'm not the only one who's copied files and folders back and forth and ended up with duplicate files hanging around.

With Duplicate Cleaner you can search by file size, name, date and it runs really fast, eliminating the most pointless songs you have, duplicates.

The second thing I did was to manually go through the folders, which is tiresome and most likely something you portion out over a few days. I didn't realize how many albums I had where I really just liked one or a few songs, the rest were just taking up space.

The third thing I did was to stop copying/downloading complete folders of music from friends and if I do, now I make a habit of listening to every single track in that folder to see what I would or could use and what I wouldn't.

This is just like when you're browsing through your photos. You had a great day out with friends, you took 300 pics but most of them look the same and some you don't even know what they are. I usually go through my photos several times, every time deleting more and more photos until I have the very best ones that I really want to keep.

I applied the same mentality here. So every once in a while, I go through my folders, a little at a time when I'm bored and just start deleting stuff I'm pretty sure I won't use.

A good way of seeing whether or not you need a cleanup is to go into Traktor for instance and sort your collection by how many times you've played the songs in your collection.

If you're anything like me, there will be a few thousand songs on that list with a big fat zero on them.

One last piece of advice is to backup all your songs before you start deleting. Then you can keep them for 6-12 months after you have done your big cleanup and still be sure that if you accidentally deleted something that was truly amazing, you can still get it back.

When you're sure you don't need those old files again you can use a backup software like [ame="http://download.cnet.com/SyncBack-Freeware/3000-2242_4-10413802.html"]SyncBack[/ame] and sync the backup with your computer, automatically deleting the files in the backup which aren't on your computer and have a fresh and clean library.

After these above mentioned steps I have successfully cut down from 9000 to about 7000 songs and I still keep deleting songs.

Good luck

[GorgeousGeorge]

I'm in the middle of doing the same thing.... boy is it a pain.

[emil_brikha]

Hang in there, totally worth it