Downsizing traktor library & getting rid of nonDJ tracks, anyway to make this easier?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Downsizing traktor library & getting rid of nonDJ tracks, anyway to make this easier?

So right now I have my Traktor directory set to my main music folder and I have it set to automatically import folders at startup. This way whenever I update my collection it automatically imports new stuff to traktor.

So right now the way it is setup is I have all the same music I have in itunes in Traktor, this includes about 15,000 non dance related tracks I would probably never DJ with which I want out of Traktor that are currently in my collection. If I ever did need them I could just go through itunes in traktor but I want to streamline my Traktor library to electronic dance music.

If I delete the tracks from my collection in Traktor, wouldn’t traktor just re-import them the next time I sart it up since it is set to automatically import?

Is there any way to delete these tracks from my collection and have traktor exclude these file on future auto-imports? Is there any way for me to do this easier than manually changing the file location of the original songs so Traktor doesn’t import them? Thanks.

2

Could you not use the iTunes intergration for Traktor? iTunes’ smart playlists are pretty sweet.

3

Well yeah, what I’m saying is I want to remove all the non dance stuff that is currently in my traktor library and have it so traktor doesn’t automatically re-import them without having to rearrange all my files.

4

Do you have them tagged a certain way different from the other tracks? You could use Trainspotter and create a smart list, then bring it into Traktor, then delete the tracks. Even if it’s a 80% solution it’s a start.

5

What I’m wondering though is even if I delete them from traktor, would traktor just automatically import them again since I automatically import my music folders at startup? I’m trying to get around manually changing my music file locations and I don’t want to have to turn automatic music folder import off in traktor.

6

You could do the following:

“normal music” manage as such
“DJ music” list as a collaboration so iTunes puts it into a single folder. Then point Traktor to that folder.

7

Why get rid of them? Maybe just make lots of really detailed playlists?

8

Traktor automatically loads itunes in a separate folder; it’s not part of ‘the collection,’ which is all your analyzed files. I plan on doing this at some point too (my collection is a hot mess currently) so I’ve been thinking about it; It seems you could organize all your stuff in itunes, then only import some of your itunes folders into ‘the collection.’ Then when playing Traktor, you should always use the collection to browse for tracks rather than itunes. If you must dig out something you didn’t import to the collection, import it to the collection first and then use it.

The downside of this is you can’t use smart playlists, or at least you can’t guarantee that your collection will have up-to-date versions of what’s in those lists, but you can just drag the new files to the right folder in the collection when you need to. Or just right-click “import to collection” or “show in collection” if it’s already there.

9

Ah let me clarify, I don’t allow itunes to manage or copy my files (I hate how it does it). I have one big music folder called “Music Library Master” and in there I have the bulk of my non-dj music sorted by artist>album>song then I have a few other folders which are giant unsorted clusterfucks of electronic music. I point traktor to “Music Library Master” and it imports everything in this folder at startup.

Now I want to separate my non-DJ type music from here since it is getting too big and confusing to have all this other stuff mixed in with my traktor collection and makes browsing for dance music difficult to browse through. I eventually want to get most of my collection optimized by trainspotter with cover art, release, proper beatport tags, key, etc

I’m afraid the only way to do this is to do some file management surgery- I’m thinking the easiest might be to duplicate my huge music folder onto an external hard drive, then go through traktor and right click and delete all the stuff I don’t want in there and click the box to delete it from the disk too so it trims down that folder to dance music. Then I have my non dance music backed up to another location and I copy it to a separate folder. Is there any other way I could do it? I’m thinking I could also just delete the artist folders I don’t want in finder after I backup the collection then when I reopen traktor and it does a consistency check it will come up with a bunch of stuff missing, would there then be a way to group all the tracks that are missing files and delete them from the collection at once?

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yes, once you have checked consistency traktor will tell you how many tracks are missing, once done you can select to relocate your tracks or in your case delete all missing tracks.

on the subject of deleting from harddrive through traktor. Is it just me or does it leave the empty folder on your harddrive to confuse you.

surely there is a way to have it remove the folder form its origin all together?

11

I would advise you going for the hard painful way.
Think about it this way, today you manage to do a little voodoo on your music folders, and you kinda get it where you want to. But as time goes by this clusterf’'k of files really gets out of hand. Then you’ll be redoing this another time and another, etc…Without really felling the beneficial part of really tidying your library.
I say do it right, it will be painful, and it will be a very long process.

What i can offer with what i gather from the way your files are organized :
-backup your entire library onto an external hard drive,
-create two new folders, one called “dj set”, the other keep it as “my music”,
-inside “dj set” create several folders depending on the type of electronic music (if you only play house go for subgeneras, like electro house, classic house, vocal house, etc..).

-then, and there is no real way around, painstakingly move your music from your “master music folder” to the “dj set”, one by one, over the course of several months (yeah i know).
-keep djiing the way you used to (with the way it was organized) until your are about 30/40 % in the process.
-at this point, point traktor to only read and update from your “dj set” folder.
-when prompted at analyzing your collection for missing files, just delete the missing, you’ll have almost started anew.

This is a painful process but very important, doing this you will get you around to listen to a lot of tracks to decide wether or not to keep them, check if the quality is good enough, or if you need to trash it and buy a good quality one, etc…
Because too much music is detrimental to doing your thing (at least if its a real mess), the only way to be able (in a sane fashion) to handle a really big music folder, is by having it organized.

I hope i didn’t sound patronizing or anything :smiley:
I had to do this process once and it took me almost a year, but now when i add music to my library, tagging 10/20 files a week, getting the name, file structure, everything nice, clean, and most importantly in a productive manner is really easy.

12

I agree with the last poster… I did this when I upgraded my laptop, I loaded everything onto an external hd then just copied over what I actually play…if I’m playing a gig and need a different non played song… I plug in the external hd and play it… Laptop stays faster aswell with this.

13

One other option, using the method of the posters above is to have two working libraries. And then instead of moving, deleting. It might be a quicker process in the end, if you have the space to accommodate two large collections while you pare them down.

14

This is what I’m thinking. I make a copy of my current big music folder to an external, then just run through the one on my laptop deleting all non dj stuff, I could do this in a day probably.

I’m in the process of tagging all my music properly with trainspotter v2 and I will have all the artist, label, genre, and release info tagged properly.

I’m wondering if once everything is tagged if there is a program I can use to sort all of my music automatically and organize it by genre>artist>release or something.

The way I got all my non DJ stuff organized was I had it on a large 160gb ipod then I used an ipod copying program which copied it back to my desktop all sorted with a proper file structure. I’m wondering if there is any program that does stuff like that just from a hard drive.

15

i bet if you sorted by bitrate in Itunes and deleted/ moved everything below, at a stretch, 192kbps, you would be left with the tunes that you would feel comfortable with djing with..

16

I would be surprised if .5% of my collection was below 192. That’s a good thing to check though I’m sure I downloaded some crappy stuff from blogs without checking but I don’t really do that anymore.

17

I don’t get why people don’t let iTunes consolidate / organize their library, yet complain about how cumbersome their library becomes; makes no sense, really.

If you’ve done the smart thing, you’ve locked all your files’ info to them and you can trash the collection and start from scratch. Traktor won’t automatically import anything unless you tell it to, so you can stop the bleeding now while you untie the knot you’ve got going on.

Oddly enough, I wrote a blog reply to a digitaldjtips.com article that he then turned into a post.

http://www.digitaldjtips.com/2011/09/confessions-of-a-music-junkie-dj-mp3s/

Short and skinny - use iTunes and let it handle your library for you. Use smart playlists. Play off of your iTunes library in Traktor. I’ve found no real benefit with Traktor’s library that can’t be accomplished with precise tagging and playlisting in Traktor. What’s better is all the added benefits of having all your music set nicely in iTunes to copy to handheld / other devices immediately if you ever need to do something with it (work out with most recent playlist, burn last night’s tracklist, copy things to a different computer without hunting for files, etc.).

18

Nice article!

I still don’t like using itunes as my main management, I don’t like the interface, it is slow, and it is really slow. I refuse to rely on itunes through traktor, after traktor opens it takes a good 2-5 minutes for itunes to load my library within traktor and the itunes part always seems to lag within it. I would much rather use the native traktor library which has an interface that I like and can rely on.

you raise some good points and itunes has some benefits but I still can’t bring myself to use it yet. I guess I could work out some sort of hybrid system but I want to delve into trainspotter since it does smart playlists and can also update and sync my traktor collection to itunes.

Playing off itunes in traktor doesn’t solve my problem of separating my non-DJ music. It is true I can trim down some of my DJ stuff, but then I still have my years and years of acquired non dance music I want to separate.

19

Thanks.

No clue why it would be slow, but I hear that a lot (especially from windwos users - not sure if you are, but I once was). Switching to a Macbook Pro opened up a whole new world of possibilities with iTunes integration and overall app optimization. 2010 model i7, so there’s a good chance that’s why the speed is negligible for me.

As I referenced in the article, I used trainspotter heavily to clean up a lot of information, but ultimately, it was over a year’s worth of working (in both windows and os x) with one consistent method of tagging, organizing, and lots of other setbacks before I came to one realization…

…that life is too short to fuck with the most difficult manner of organizing files. iTunes wants to do it for me? By all means, I’ve got better shit to do. :stuck_out_tongue:

GL.

edit: and I used to be a Winamp + WinXP + One giant folder with scattered subfolders user to the extreme. shudders

20

Yeah I also have a 2010 macbook pro i7 and it is laggy withing traktor, same as it was on windows. prob the size of my library.

I’m thinking maybe I do away with non dj music on my laptop altogether and keep that on my desktop with storage array. I’ll keep stuff that is borderline dj friendly like some elctronica and hipster indie dance kind of stuff. That would free up at least 100gb on my hard drive.

I still like the idea of using the traktor collection, maybe I’ll find a compromize between both.