I’ve given up on trying to organise my music. It’s beyond a nightmare.
I’ve got house music dating back to 2000. Started collecting around 2004 and had no organisation when doing so. It got downloaded into a “downloads” folder and left there. Whenever I felt it got too big I started a new one.
With well over 300 GB of music (each file between 8mb & 20mb) I just don’t have the patience to go through it all and sort by genre, bpm, key etc. I’ve took all the files I used for my CD wallet and foldered them how my cd wallet was made.
A - Artists with over 10 releases worth playing (Angello, Axwell, Hatiras, Freemasons, Fuzzy Hair, etc)
B - Funky/Disco/Warmup
C - House/Progressive/Electro
D - Classics
E - Minimal/Tech/Deep
F - Music collected early 2012
G - Music collected so far
It’s a mess.
Any tunes I find when looking through my hard drive get added to the later folders to keep them in my mind.. Thank God for spotlight on macbooks.
I use itunes to do all my playlists and tagging. I used to use Traktor, but frankly, I got tired of losing my playlists when I altered my traktor collection. Using itunes is a little more work, but worth it with not as many headaches as before. I do all my updates there initially, and then drag the updated itunes playlist into my traktor playlists. Then I just remove duplicates. Only bad part is that the cover art seems to disappear, but I run a consistency check on the folder, and it comes back.
I make iTunes playlists based on genre’s, and whether or not they’re “new” or “old”. The definition of that is really up to myself as to how long I think I can play a song from when they come out lol.
And then I access the playlists from Traktor.
I do that for the times I have to play on someone’s Serato using my laptop.
i have hundreds of gigs of music in different formats and genres on external harddrives… lol there is no way in hell i am gonna try to organize that… instead i copy of the music i am DJing with or listening to at the time and organize that.. hell i even buy the song agian sometimes instead of going through that massive collection
One big reason I’m using MP3 more and more, actually AAC as they sound even better, is the meta tag data stored in the files so I could sort out info via iTunes or similar tools via the ID3 tag. Otherwise I agree managing lots and lots of digital files is painful, you need to invent a file naming and directory scheme… Now, iTunes could handle WAV files, but you need add the info for each imported WAV and its only stored in the database. But maybe that’s better than nothing.
One positive thing for going through old files is that you suddenly find cool tracks you forgotten about and you could play again.