iTunes Alternatives?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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iTunes Alternatives?

I’ve been using iTunes to manage my DJ library for many years but the recent iTunes Music update has completely fucked up my entire program. I saw the DJTT post about how to recover lost playlists (I lost mine) but I’m actually using iTunes Music to stream/listen to music so I would like to find an alternative to manage my DJ library (it seems like iTunes is becoming less and less well-suited to managing a large DJ library anyway). I use a Mac and would prefer not to move to just a file/folder structure, if possible (difficult to maintain).

Any suggestions on what’s good to switch to?

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You should set up multiple iTunes libraries - 1 for your Dj stuff, and a separate one for streaming and listening.

For the DJ library, disable ALL “connection” funtionality (iStore, Genius, etc…)

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12366?locale=en_US

3

I manage the music in my DJ software, then when I want to copy it to my iphone, I just export the playlists as m3u, wipe everything in iTunes, then drag the playlists into it and it imports all the current versions of everything so I can sync them.

iTunes needs to die though. When Android gets low latency audio that performs as well as on iOS, i’m gone.

4

I use Beatport pro and itunes. In itunes,I never had any of my music connected. However I don’t have an iPhone or anything for that to be useful. I also backup using Google music and a computer backup with crashplan.

5

I have always and will always use Rhythmbox. its my audio player of choice. I can export my playlists and import them into rekordbox or traktor no problems.

although it is a linux program, they might make a mac/windows version

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file hierarchy…mic drop

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i use itunes to only import and sort my music. (no itunesmatch, no itunesmusic)
to tag the id3 data (picture, comments,..) and analyze the key, I use rekordbox.
finally, traktor is analysing bpm and gain.

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This is similar to my workflow, except I leave out rekordbox and use iTunes Match. Currently I only utilize one iTunes library for all of my personal stuff and DJ stuff, but I am seriously considering splitting the two up.

I do a fair share of top-40 club and mobile gigs. With a massive song library and only a 250GB hard drive, it’s hard to have every song I need right at my fingertips. With Match, I keep all of my go-to club tracks ready to go via local files that are sorted by iTunes, which are then imported into Traktor. If I’m at a mobile gig, I set up a hotspot and pull the really left-field requests down from the cloud. After the gig, I usually just delete the local files, check consistency in Traktor, and delete them out of my collection. This means I have access to a large amount of music if needed, without cluttering up my hard drive with one-off stuff I’ll likely never play again.

Is it the best long-term workflow? I dunno, but it seems to be working fine so far.