How do you go about organizing your Traktor music?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

How do you go about organizing your Traktor music?

Hi guys. One thing that I haven’t really figured out is why Traktor Pro doesn’t offer full integration with the iTunes library. I am very well organized within iTunes, with tracks in separate R&B, Hiphop, Trance, Progressive House, House etc playlists.

It’d be awesome if I could just play them in Traktor, but instead NI wants us to import them into Traktor’s own music collection.

My problem with this is that it’s getting teduous keeping all Traktor playlists in sync manually with my constantly changing iTunes playlists. I currently organize iTunes and then launch Traktor to add the same tracks into basically the same playlists in Traktor.

Of course, I don’t have all my iTunes music in Traktor because not everything is suitable for dj:ing, but the music that is suitable is already organized perfectly. How do you go about this?

2

Traktor reads your iTunes playlists on every launch, what do you mean you have to sync them manually?

3

They are not imported into Traktor’s own collection upon launch. Can I skip this step and just don’t bother with the Traktor collection and use iTunes instead?

4

you have two (among other) categories

own collection
itunes

if you click on itunes, it freshes direct from your itunes playlist (i believe xml) and displays all your tracks, smart playlists, and normal playlists.

5

You can play straight from the iTunes node, but Traktor works best if you add the track to the collection first. Unfortunately there is no way other than manually deleting and adding the playlists in Traktor’s collection when you make changes to the iTunes playlist.

6

jojo, is there a way to transpose itunes ratings to the traktor collection?

thats the only thing preventing me from jumping over to pure traktor collection usage.

7

I ussually stick to making my “crates” in my itunes (aka making a playlist on itunes) and then loading Traktor and accessing it under iTunes.

From what I see it is not that big of a bother since all I have to do on upon launching is open my iTunes node…which does take about 1-2 seconds:eek:

8

It should carry over from iTunes to Traktor once the song is analyzed. You may have to check consistency in Traktor if you make changes to a song in iTunes after it’s been added to Traktor’s collection. I have Traktor set to check consistency whenever it opens adds a bit of time to boot up, but it’s worth it for pointing out problems that may have arisen before i start playing.

9

ya i def use the ‘check consistency’ option each and every time, but i find it is not porting over the ratings.

wasn’t sure if it matches the id3 for itunes ratings as i hear itunes has a particular way it handles ratings…

will work some more with it…

10

This confuses me too. Some tracks have ratings and some do not. Weird.

11

I just have a file with all my songs and import it into my collection. Then I just tag everything up(work in progress) and create play lists.

I find I need to have access to everything in a big long list to I can access them intuitively.

12

I’m wrong. Traktor does not update the ratings changes made in iTunes unless you delete and reimport the track.

13

But I sometimes rate tracks before import and they still don’t show.

14

I believe I’ve had those kind of issues too, have you checked whether those tracks are MP3? If not, convert them (inside iTunes is easy) and try again.

15

They might not be. I have a lot of purchased AAC music too. It’s a minor issue though since I need to do so much manually anyway. Rating is the least of my concerns :smiley:

16

Ratings aren’t important to me either, but I didn’t like Traktor not being able to store BPM in their ID3 tags. I like to browse my iTunes playlists instead of Traktor playlists, and missing BPM’s is quite a problem.

Why not just convert them? It’s literally no work: inside iTunes, sort the songs on their type (create a new column to do this). Then just select all your AAC’s, and choose ‘Make MP3’. Done.
Don’t forget to change your import settings though, default is at 128kbps which you probably don’t want.

17

Because converting from one lossy format to another isn’t very good for audio quality.

18

Ive found that anything I change in Traktor as far as metadata doesn’t get “seen” in itunes until I play the track in itunes. So my M.O. is to import a playlist I create in itunes into Traktor. Anaylze, beatgrid and set cuepoints. Lock it in Traktor, go back to itunes and play each song in the playlist, then the metadata get’s updated in itunes. You can bring up say the BPM comment field in itunes and see tht it adds the BPM that Traktor analyzed the track at as soon as you press play in itunes.