Music Organization tips for Serato

[DJArmani]

What's Up Guys,

I've been organizing my music library on my laptop for a while now and I am almost done organizing my entire old music library. I have them organized in folders on my laptop by genre. However, these folders do not correspond to my workflow in Serato. For example, these folders are good for crafting specific playlists for events (such as private events and corporate gigs), but I do mostly clubs nowadays. All of my recent club stuff I keep in a desktop folder with the month and year. For example I have 2017 -> January - December 2017 Downloads (each month I make a new folder for music downloads). However, some of the songs in these folders are oldies I sometimes find when surfing pools and the internet for stuff I don't have. This creates a folder too big to quickly dash through when playing out or even when getting a small playlist together. I also try not to make too many subfolders because stuff starts getting lost or I forget about a folder I created. I'm trying to have my Serato set up where I can easily navigate between 'go-to tracks', 'openers', 'peak hour', 'club hits', 'classics'. I simply have too many tracks, and too much music is dropping that these folders would be HUGE and I wouldnt keep up. I wanted to have a few different ones but not sure how to have them organized. Should I go based off venues I play? Genres? Energy? Key? Any help is appreciated.

[astromech]

I break my library down by year bought (a playlist per year), then use comments to tag tracks by genre and key, plus some reminders about the track content. If I go for a gig, I have another playlist folder with a playlist for each gig that has 6-12 tracks that I'd like to play that night.

I don't buy vast amounts of music, though. In 2017, I added 250 tracks to my library.

[mostapha]

I do it a lot like I did on vinyl...

iTunes is my master library, largely because it plays all of the formats I care about and works with basically everything I care about. In Traktor (or rekordbox, and I've done the same in Serato before), I just browse the iTunes part of the playlist and don't bother with crates or playlists in the DJ software itself.

If nothing else, it makes it easier to switch software.

In the Genre field, I add "DJ" if a song is something I want to show up in DJ playlists. If I want to take something out, I just remove that. And I have "listening music" separate, which is everything that doesn't have that tag.

Everything else is done with smart playlists with that as a starting point. How you do that is up to you. I do it by "big picture" genres, mostly pulled from the genre tags. And if I want some song to show up in more than one, it just has multiple words in the genre field.

I either DJ from those directly or use them to build a manual playlsit for the night.

[the_bastet]

I use a crate for master genre
Then that crate is broken down into subcrates organized by year released
Then each year is broken into subcrates by sub genre with seperate sub crates for a top 100, All, and Prep

Each track tagged under label and genre for the sub genre they are and which sub genre they mix with the best.

I do it the same way for Serato, Rekordbox, and Traktor.

[DJArmani]

Appreciate all of the feedback. I will definitely use some of these techniques when I start organizing!

[DJ Odawa]

I use iTunes for my master library. I then create a crate in Serato DJ for each iTunes playlist and simply drag and drop from iTunes to the corresponding crate in serato. I Have my playlist organized by genre/subgenre (House>deep, funky, tech, soul, Latin). I also use the categories in serato browser for further organizing (i.e. Album, date added, comments). I use the color coding feature within serato library for quick reference. I use four colors for each genre crate. I use yellow, green, blue and pink, representing intensity with yellow being chill/relaxing. Green for tunes with organic elements like funk guitar, piano, orchestra etc. Blue for more upbeat housey/club tunes and pink for my bangers. This works for all my genres. I also take the extra step by using hashtags in the comment column. For instance, I use "#vocal" for all electronic tunes with vocals. "#bass" for bass heavy tunes or "#melodic. In action, if I'm searching for a tune to play next, I can search for "#deep #vocal #chill #opener. Once the results show up, I can then click on the browser field to organize the tunes via color code. It is very labor intensive when starting from scratch with thousands of tunes, but we'll worth the effort.