Finished library purging, now what's the best way to organize my files on my HDD?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Finished library purging, now what’s the best way to organize my files on my HDD?

I went through an purged over 20,000 songs from my collection and hard drive. I did this through traktor by right clicking and selecting delete from collection and hard drive. The byproduct of this is I have a massive mess of orphaned empty nested folders with files all over the place.

I’m wondering the best way to reorganize my files now and what software to use to automate this.

I am considering letting itunes organize everything once to sort things then not have it manage my music anymore. I don’t like that if I change a tag in itunes it messes with the file location and will mess up traktor, and I will not use itunes through traktor since there is no cover art and itunes support is still slow.

If I reorganize all my files will I have to redo my whole traktor collection and playlists?

I also wonder how best to sort music since if you do the typical artist > album > track file structure then it splits up compilations which I would like to avoid.

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my collection depends a lot upon the “date created” concept of file ordering within windows because I remember the time frame of my purchases much better than the actual tracks. I used to put every track for a particular release in it’s own Album folder but that got really unwieldy.
Now I simply keep everything in a single folder and make sure to add all the correct tags and grids the day of purchase adding new songs to analyze in Traktor one-by-one in order to preserve a specific sequence for genre, album, artist etc. WHen I used to drag and analyze en masse shit would get all mixed up because some songs would finish before others.
I also use winamp lite as my media player and it 1) Never fucks my tracks by updating tags 2) is able to read flac file and tags (thus maintaining a compilations’ integrity) 3) has a much more robust sorting and search window 4) doesn’t piss me off by moving tracks into a proprietary ordering system and renaming

I always remember something about a track, be it artist, remixer, publisher wtv so searching between winamp or inside Traktor guarantees i’ll find what i’m looking for. I usually maintain an <artist - track name [remixer]> file naming convention but not as religiously as I used to since files are abstracted between Traktor and winamp anyway.

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That brings up another question for me, is there any way to rename files in some unified system based on their tags?

Because I updated all my tags pretty much perfectly, now my file names are still all over the place. Never thought about putting it all in one folder but that seems like it could get a little crazy.

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All in one is not crazy for me because I don’t keep a lot of active tracks (>800) and don’t actually browse the folder via the OS since Traktor and Winamp effectively do it for me. But then again my method also involves PN to MiK and Audacity and is tuned to my flow. Not that those programs are necessary I’ve just kept that system to maintain consistency.

I actually spend a lot of time going through tracks during the day (work) to find loops and potential cue points jotting down notes to implement when I get home. This alone has kept me pretty organized. (perhaps a great idea for an iPad app?) Before I would find myself belabored over file structure and storage rather than song structure and sound. One single folder works for me.
As for autorenaming based on tags I can’t help you. I always manually rename immediately after downloading.

I should also mention that I keep my older, unused tracks on a separate HD ready to plop back into Traktor should I feel inspired. So far i’ve not had an issue where the strip and and cues aren’t magically there when I bring an old track back (unless it predates Traktor 2.x’s colored waveform)

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If you change the tags in itunes and still have that same song in an itunes playlist traktor should be able to find it. And I have the newest version of traktor and it shows all my cover art.

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by how you feel about them…

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please explain “tuned to your flow”…

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pretty much tuned to my workflow. I buy tracks, download, rename to standard convention, import into PN, import into MiK, bring the resulting wav into Audacity and export as flac (**after first importing the original mp3 into Audacity because all the tags get carried over on the flac export).
i do this track by track in order of either release date or artist so when I import into Traktor the tracks are in sequence.

**I am aware that going from mp3 to flac gains no quality…i just don’t want to reconvert to mp3

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Yes, I used a program called Media Monkey, it’s freeware that lets your update filenames based on whatever criteria you want. For example it updated my entire library and you can set something like <Artist- Song(Remixer)(Key)> and it will update it for you.

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motion seconded for Mediamonkey. From there you can rename your track AND organize them the way you want. It’s an amazing software, even better if you like to roll your own script/add-on. The tag editor sucks IMHO but it’s really workable. The free version is cool, but a lifetime paid upgrade worth it, check out their comparison chart. Freeware don’t allow you to go on a forum and ask for feature & fix… in my programmer’s mind though.

I organize them by genre on my hdd. In traktor I add playlist sorted by import date. One folder per year, each year have Month subfolder, and each month subfolder have it’s import date playlist & favorites.

Don’t forget, once you rename your track, you’ll also need to run a check consistency which will also scrap all your previous playlist when you’ll remove the missing files.

Buy/rip your tracks, tag them, rename, import, you’re done.

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Is mediamonkey PC only?

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YES and it’s a good thing hahahaha, I know they said they’re working on a cross-platform version some day.

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Someone should do an article for the blog about purging the library and making sure your bases are covered.

  1. Deleting old/crappy versions of tracks, upgrading with high quality versions
  2. Updating the Traktor collection to kill any old files
  3. Adding high quality tracks to Traktor collection and making sure cue points and grids are still good.
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Bumping an old thread. I still need to fix my music file structure. I have my trimmed down library tagged properly in traktor about 2500 songs. Only problem is everything is in a huge mess of nested folders and files all over the place.

I want a program or something to organize all my music and just dumb everything into genre folders. Just like 10 folders then all the raw tracks in there. Is there anything for mac to do this? Itunes is awful for this and puts everything in a clusterfuck of 1000 nested folders which slows down traktor loading and consistency checks.

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Sad face I can’t help this thread…I know it doesn’t help, but I’ll say it anyway…best success I’ve had is going by downloaded song month, and then BPM. Best of the best rises to the top. Not what you’re talking about though; I wish software like that would come out.

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Don’t bother updating your file structure. Music software tends to build it’s own tag based database, so its just a waste of time

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We need some software guru to build windows media player 10 into a stable player/ripper from this platform, add high quality burning capabilities,add works well with DJ software of your choice. It already has the feature to right click on the track and there are 12 tag editors right there title, genre, subtitle, mood, track #, bpm, key, album, original album, set, music category description, and language. On top of that when online you can force look-up and add the information, even if it is incorrect. Then add to Apple’ super fast search. WAH LA there it is I’m a Trillionaire.

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Get a PC… get Mediamonkey. End of the story :wink:

:smiley:

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Hi Xonetacular, I may be a little late on this thread, and for that I’m sorry. New here, haven’t familiarized myself with people yet. I’m a veteran computer tech (PC only, sorry). However, I’m a HUGE fan of interesting workarounds, and I believe I have a solution that will work on your Mac (I assume that’s what you’re using, because of the dismay of your “Is Mediamonkey PC only?” message)

This is a more complex setup, but once implemented should cure your illness, and you don’t have to purchase anything new.

Part of being a computer tech for all my friends and family, and their friends means I have access to an indescribable amount of music stored on harddrives. Because of the .. sampling.. I’ve been doing from various friends, I’m also a HUGE fan of Mediamonkey (so much so that I bought the Gold edition - when you get to 100,000 tracks, you will be, too).

The issue you’re having is that the solution offered (Mediamonkey) isn’t Mac compatible. So, just like having to use a middle-man software to interpret HID-keystrokes into MIDI controls, we, in theory, can do a half-step to accomplish your media organization using Mediamonkey.

“How?”

Install a virtual machine on your Mac that runs a Windows-based operating system (like XP), install Mediamonkey into the Windows VM, share your music library with full read/write control to the Windows VM, and point Mediamonkey to the network share as if it were the library it was managing “locally” (native to the VM).

Mediamonkey should then sort the files automatically over the “network”, thereby re-organizing the files on your Mac, from your Mac, through a hierarchy of programs, with no additional hardware needed.

Free virtual machine platform:

I can get you a legitimate Windows XP Home CoA so you can install Windows (if you’re in the states, I can mail you the CoA, as well). If you need a software disc for Windows, I can get you one as well.

While I’m not a pro at network sharing on Mac’s, I can help with the Windows side, and if you really feel lost, I offer remote support (at no charge for this special occasion - i.e. I want to see if my theory works).

Total time to set this up should take maybe two to three hours. That’s including roughly an hour to download, install and configure Virtual Box, and the estimated autonomous hour it takes to install Windows XP. That leaves an hour to download and install Mediamonkey, share the network drives, set your settings, and test it out.

Prior to this, I highly recommend backing up your entire music library to an external drive, or a completely new directory outside of your normal music library, as having Mediamonkey reorganize your files can have undesirable effects (such as tracks “missing” from your DJ software). If after the process is complete, you find that it’s done too much collateral damage in your DJ software, we can then restore your library to its original state and approach from a different angle.

Let me know if you’d like to give this a shot. - Mark

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I let iTunes do it. I tried to nitpick everything without it, and finally just got fed up with it. Doesn’t seem to be much of an issue with Serato, I couldn’t tell you for Traktor though. And it’s REALLY easy to find files now lol.