I have read a few times now that Itunes is the preferred program to store and organize you’re DJ music collection. I have been using traktor to organize my music but very often the files go missing and I have to take a good ten minutes to relocate them. This doesn’t seem to happen in itunes. However, one time I accidently deleted a few hundred songs from my collection because Itunes has a prompt “delete from computer” which is in the spot I click by reflex. That pissed me off a lot!
People say Itunes has more power in tagging you’re songs and sorting them. But doesn’t traktor allow you to edit tags as well? PLus you can use you’re mappings to sift through and load songs into you’re deck. You can’t do that in itunes?
ANyone care to share their experience with music organization?
I use iTunes, its the most convenient for me and whatever I do in iTunes translates perfectly into Traktor.
The comments section, the star rating, and smart playlists really are efficient for me! I only wish there were more ‘zones’ such like album, artist, title - but for the following: mood, energy (some people use stars for energy, I like to use stars to rate how much I like the song though), other.
so you just drag the songs from itunes to traktor? you don’t mind not having dedicated load buttons
also whats the best way to set up itunes. I have all my music in a big folder with sub folders for genre called “traktor music”. i tried draggin it into itunes and it was a mess. It takes forever and it created dozens of playlists.
Some people here don’t like the “Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized” option, but honestly it has saved my life, and I am a strong advocate of it. I import all my music into iTunes, and then go into Traktor and simply create playlists of the iTunes music. Hasn’t been an issue for me so far, and it helps me go through a fresh batch of songs more in-depth, as I’m not scratching my head trying to pick out what is new from what is old.
when it says “move to trash OR keep files” I thought it deleted the original file but it only deletes the duplicate file that itunes creates in the itunes music folder.
Noooo absolutely not. I do the library organization prior to using Traktor. Never simultaneously. My Traktor library is organized just like however my iTunes library is automatically.
Organizing does take SEVERAL hours. What makes it faster is making for sure is: 1. You delete all the songs you don’t really enjoy anymore/never play, or at the very least put them in their own separate playlist. 2. Everytime you add a song you tag it appropriately right then and there to not let the mess accumulate.
I use playlists in itunes that are sorted by date, normally by month/year ie. May,12
In traktor I made playlists based on BPM and genre, and when I import songs to traktor, I set bpm, key and cue points
I found this is useful because If I am looking for a particular genre or bpm I use traktor (75% of the time) and use itunes if I am looking for new tunes, or tunes from last semester, over the summer or whatever (25% of the time)
@Fraktionz - could you elaborate on smart playlists? I assume its different than genius
Oh I can definitely see how the bpm grouping is an advantage to doing it in Traktor!
My genre grouping from smart playlists though covers that fairly well. However they don’t actually divulge the actual bpm, just luckily for my electronic playlists the bpms are similar…need to figure out a solution for my hip hop and rock.
Smart playlists in iTunes is basically an automatic generated playlist based on your selection criteria for what you want to be included in your new smart playlist. So how it differs from a regular playlist where you have to drag each song you want into it, the smart playlist just automatically groups anything in that playlist that you’ve chosen in your criteria. ie. Genre: Rock, the smart playlist will group all songs with that genre together into one playlist. Of course smart playlists are only useful if you’ve done your homework to label things properly, like your genres, groups, comments, etc. They can be used for much more advanced things that just genre sorting…
Give it a try yourself! In iTunes Ctrl + Alt + N (windows)
I’ve spent a lot of the morning learning about itunes and organizing my music with it. It has some good functions such as localizing all you’re music in one folder and the ability to “batch” tag many files at once. For example, I imported a couple hundred dubstep tracks I had on my computer and batch named the genre “Dubstep” so that they would all come up. (some had dubstep-electronic, or even electronic) so that helps.
I notice that traktor has its own itunes tab in the browser. I assume that many of you guys do not use that? Because although you can find the songs they are not officially in traktors collection and so don’t have cue points, beatgrid, bpm labeling?
Do you ever have any problems with the collection coming up with missing tracks? Or does the fact that itunes localizes all songs to the itunes music folder solve that problem?
it was there all along. Not sure if the smart playlists will actually help, but its a cool feature i’ll be messing around with for awhile. sooo thanks!
Phloston - Yes I use the itunes tab in traktor. And yes I have missing files occasionally, couldn’t tell you why
iTunes + iMatch is the best that has happened concerning music organizations in my mind. Last night I got a sudden temp bass + DJ gig. I just found some suitable stuff from iTunes Match that I downloaded to my DJ laptop an hour before leaving for the gig, using various play lists an personal tags. Job done. Plus I could organize my tracks from any of my five computers hooked to iTunes match, over at work, sitting here in my couch just now and so on… If the site has an open WiFi I could even download tracks minutes before the set starts.
Get Tracks → Picard for Meta Data (Fixes Data and organized folders) → Album Art Downloader → MP3Tag (To do Genres) → Copy to Music Folder → Use that as library root in Traktor
Try JRiver Media Jukebox, it’s the free audio only version of their Media Center software and is extremely configurable in this respect. You can drag and drop into Traktor in the same way.
Although I think you are confusing zones, which refers to devices and computers which you can use to stream audio, with categories that you might use to browse your music.
it was there all along. Not sure if the smart playlists will actually help, but its a cool feature i’ll be messing around with for awhile. sooo thanks!