Advice for setting up

[Bedlam]

Hello all.

A little background on me: I've Dj'ed professionally since 1990, however I took a break of sorts for the last couple of years. I come from the world of 1200's, Dennon, Pioneer, and Rane equipment playing electronic dance music. I have iTunes, but there is very little of my music stored in it. For the most part, my music collection consists of records, CD's, self made CD copies, and an 1TB external drive of .wav files. When playing out with CD's, I use SKB cases, and keep my music alphabetized by artist with a separate section for compilations.

I Just purchased a Kontrol S4 to be used currently with my PC desktop, and when I am ready to play out with Traktor, I will be purchasing a PC laptop. I know the benefits of Mac vs. PC in a sound environment, but this simply is not going to happen, so please don't waste your time explaining it to me.

The advice I am looking for is what your opinions are on how to set up my music libraries for use in Traktor for the first time. I would like to save the work load of trial and error and have things set up in a logical format. Specific questions I have are:
1. Should I use iTunes for cataloging my music? I have many (over 10,000) songs from vinyl that have been converted to .wav files, put in folders and categorized, and then burned to CD. What is the best way to convert these songs to MP3 format to minimize typing? Is there any song recognition software that I should know about?
2. If I go with iTunes, is it possible to set up BPM and Key information (or is that something that Traktor does?) Is there any BPM or Key software that I should know about?
3. When importing playlists and such into Traktor, is there any structure that you have found that proves to be logical when searching through music for "that one song."
4. What about cover art? I know you can get cover art for songs purchased on iTunes, but what about other albums not purchased from iTunes, records, and CD's?
5. Any other advice or insights would be greatly appreciated!

Please keep in mind that i will be moving Traktor to a different computer at a later date, and I do not want to take an external hard drive with me while I am gigging. I look forward to everyone's advice.

Ryan

[Remco]

1. I would not add 10000 tracks in Traktor via iTunes. The MP3 question i dont understand, Traktor plays WAV....
2. Traktor does also set BPM , key information you must add youself, a program for key's is Mixed in key.
3. Everybody creates there own system what works best for you to work with.
4. Thats something i have never bothered to figure out so i'm kinda curious on that answer myself.
5. I use PC / laptop , not Mac but one advice if you buy a laptop: dont buy one with AMD processor, they often conflict with Traktor Pro2 go Intel to be safe!

[rjc]

1. Unfortunately, I'm not too sure with what software would allow you to easily convert that much music.
However, Traktor allows you to import folders as Playlists from the inbuilt File Explorer. That may be your best bet for cataloguing music.

2. http://www.mixedinkey.com/ Expensive, but very well renown, and will automatically append Key to the respective field, and is readable directly in Traktor. As for BPM, when you analyse your tracks within Traktor (Mandatory to render the visual waveforms), it will set the BPM's. However it doesn't do a very good job with tracks that have swinging tempos (EG a live drummer), or tempo changes. Ean Golden's youtube channel has tips for dealing with that.

3. ^^^ Everybody has their own system that works for them. Personally, every time I import music, I import it as a Playlist, date it, and archive it within a folder. From there, I move the tracks into playlists of around 100 tracks each (House, Progressive, Dub, Hip Hop), and sort the playlists by key. Another tip I picked up from these blogs is to use the star rating system to help catagorise my music. 1 star for potential openers, 3 for the meat of sets, and 5 for the bangers.

4. Not too sure about that one. If you highlight and right click a track within itunes, and press 'Get album Artwork', it will find the artwork for music that can be found through the Itunes store (Whether purchased or not). For non-itunes tracks and ripped Vinyl, Somebody els ewill have to help out.

5. Learn as much as you can about Beatgridding early on, Traktor is pretty good in doing it automatically, but if you're planning on mixing 3+ decks and are using sync, manually setting them can let your mixes really sing.

[Bedlam]

First of all, thank you rjc & Remco for your replies. If anyone else has insights to share, please continue this thread.
1. I've started loading part of my collection into iTunes and for actual CD's, GraceNote is doing a fine job at getting the artist/track/album information. However, after doing further research, it appears that I will have to manually type in the information for songs that I have on my hard drive in .wav format. This is exactly what I was trying to avoid, because I will be typing out info for the next few months, but it is what it is.

2. Thank you for the information on the Key software, I'm going to research it further before pulling the trigger.

3. If anyone has any other systems that they use, I'd still like to hear about it.

4. I found a great article on getting album artwork: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/conten...in-itunes.html Even when using itunes to rip CD's, I have run into many instances of the artwork not being available. This article provides easy solutions!

5. Once again, any other insights would be appreciated. The S4 is due to arrive tomorrow and I am stoked!

Ryan

[dJ SOUZA]

Hi there, if you have your .wav files named on your hard drive with "artist - song name" or some such combination you can use Tag&Rename to pull the metadata from the filename. It's expensive but there is a free trial available. I've been using it for years... hope that helps with your naming woes!

[JohnnyDrama]

Try Mediamonkey, it's free and works great.