I’ve been wondering for a while now, how often I should give my collection a proper cleaning. It is obvious that most DJ kinda change their taste through the course of time, and I’ve definately started enjoying different music than when I began DJ’ing. So I think I would rather give it a proper cleaning and know my tracks more intimate, than having a big monster you don’t know so well.
So my question is, how often do you go through your collection and remove the stuff you’re not into anymore?
I use a star system, if I don’t know about a track anymore it gets 1 star, I will usually bring up all the 1 and 2 star tracks every so often and delete the ones I will never play. I really avoid getting tracks I don’t like though, because I only buy what I want, I never torrent random shit..
But that being said, it’s nice having a backlog to bring out some old classics now and again. I’d suggest just moving the files to a separate folder and then not loading it into your itunes, and just keeping them there. If there’s ever a point where you realllly feel the need to bust out some of the tracks, then you’ll be able to.
i do something similar too. I have a folder labeled “legacy tracks” where i throw tracks that i take out of circulation. I only like to keep about 100 tracks together for making sets, and then i dip into the legacy when i really need a track that fits.
I’ve been on cleaning mode for the last few weeks. My goal is to have a perfect DJ ready library with zero fluff. So far I have gone from 12k tracks to 6500. My goal is to get down to about 5-6k of killer tracks ready for parties. I have tagged extensively which had been a daunting task but allows me to sort by genre so I can quickly pull up a great set at any time.
As far as how I do it…I have weird, ridiculous combinations of automated and manual backup systems. When I realize I haven’t played a song in a while (iTunes can sort by Last Date Played) on my laptop, I check to make sure it’s not a track that I only listen to while DJing…if I decide I don’t want it anymore–really, if I don’t decide that I do want it–then I just delete it…confidant that it’s still in my archives and on my TimeMachine drive (for a while, at least).
And I don’t remember the last time I went to my archives for something I’d deleted that I wanted to spin in a set. Wait, yes…I had a remix of a Gorillaz song that I wanted for a specific party. It’s a really lousy bootleg that sounds like it was mastered by me when I was 20 and had just discovered iZotope Ozone. I never want that track in my set unless I’m 100% confident that like 10 specific people will be at a house party, 'cuz is sounds like crap on a real system and isn’t worth it unless those people are going to get a kick out of it.
Neither have I. I can still find specific songs in my vinyl collection in a few seconds, and I haven’t owned turntables in 2 years. It often takes minutes to find an old track on my iTunes library if I don’t remember the artist or title (which happens quite a lot), and it might take an hour to find one in my archives, because they’re not indexed in iTunes.
I don’t miss paying $12/song; I don’t miss not having key lock; I don’t miss carrying it…but I really miss big pieces of cover art.
If I could, i’d switch traktor into using Micro decks shoved up at the top with minimal information, ~200x200px pieces of cover art below each one, and have the rest of the screen dedicated to a cover art browser. Heck, I’d consider a bigger screen for my DJing laptop if I could have that. I’d probably sacrifice big waveforms for that…just have 2 to 4 pieces of cover art side-by-side at the top with a really minimal waveform above each one.
How the heck do you remember that much music?
My goal is usually <200 or so for a night…and the same ~100 make the cut for months at a time.
Seriously. I can’t imagine bringing that much music to a gig. I mean…I’ve done it before…and I still mostly pick from the same 100 tracks…it just takes longer to scroll between them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
