Managing the “Preselection” playlist in Traktor Pro
So at my first gig I did the following. Please note that I am totally at the beginning of DJing. I imported all of my rating 5 tracks, plus I hand imported a view tracks that I knew would fly with the crowd. I placed them in a “Preselection” playlist that I loaded into my favorites. I then tried to cluster the songs in that list a bit by genre and other criterias. The idea being that if I feel that the crowd now wants to hear lets say a bit of disco, I can just select the given cluster and move it into the “Preparation” playlist. I will need to look into creating a keyboard short cut for move, but for now I just added them and then manually deleted them. This way the lists both stayed manageable in size.
In the “Preparation” playlist I ensured that things would be ordered in the order I actually want to play things, though I did not enable automatic loading of tracks when a track finished. If I then decided to skip a track I moved it back to the “Preselection” list. Since I would edit the same cluster, it would mean I would import the “disco cluster” with about 10 tracks and then move back about 5 tracks in practice because I then wanted to move to a different style again.
This worked out quite well for me and made sure I had enough time to add some cue points since I had to spend less time on searching for the next song to play.