My home / HiFi collection: all lossless M4A managed in iTunes, with extensive meta tagging and album art. I need to have it this way because I want to use iTunes and it won’t accept FLAC and WAV doesn’t have proper meta fields (e.g. ID3v2). This is my biggest collection (.7TB lossless) Sometimes I discover great stuff for a live set and copy it from here to my DJ collection.
My bedroom DJ collection: It’s a mixed collection but I prefer the highest quality available. This completely depends on what I can get my hands on (aka afford or have access to). Some stuff I have was only recorded on a cassette by some one-day Belgium New Wave band in the 80s. Other stuff is fully 24bit/96kHz. So you’ll understand how much the quality varies here. All is managed in (a different library in) iTunes.
My actual live DJ collection: Also managed in the same library as the bedroom collection. Smart playlists separate the WAV’s from other formats. I’ve just started with this and I admit it, I’m confused. See below for my questions:
How do you manage your music?
And especially how to handle WAV files?
If you remove Traktor from the possibilities… I use Mediamonkey, none the less. Joy of having a PC…
Classed the way you want, how you want. I class my stuff by genre, period. I fill BPM, Year, Artist and Title tags. Sprinkle few comments and rating here and there. RReally simple stuff.
Most of the stuff I play regularly is in my Traktor library but other than that I will use Foobar for searching my music, the search on Foobar works really nice with a big collection, a lot easier than browsing the folders.
For listening I use Foobar and again most of my library is in flac, all arranged by artist (or album artist for compilations) then year and title.
wavs converted to Flac.
On the mac, there is a freeware to use flac on Itunes, it’s called ‘fluke’, (if anyone knows of a pc equiv. I would love to know).
I use trainspotter 2 to do all my smart playlists. Amazing utility.