Organizing a massive library

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Organizing a massive library

When I got back into mobile DJing I was using a simple methodology to manage my music library, I am on Mac and currently use Traktor.

Subscribe to iTunes Match
Import into iTunes, tag
If there was music that was not worth keeping local, delete local copy and keep in the cloud
Sync Traktor to my entire local library

This was fine till I reached a 25,000 song limit which I am now about to exceed. So I need a new methodology.

I am also concerned that as my library grows iTunes might start to choke and not be useful.

What do you do with your very large libraries?

2

My iTunes has 45,000 tracks (505GB) and doesn’t seem to have an issue. It loads quickly and the search still works fast.

There are some posts on the NI forums about users experiencing slowdowns with their Traktor libraries exceeding 50000 tracks.

My Traktor library is only 1500 songs so can’t comment personally.

3

Right now with my iTunes cloud methodology, I only sync about 5000 songs in my current library. :It seems to handle that amount well, but being a mobile DJ I am finding myself with those odd requests that means I should sync everything to Traktor.

I just acquired a DJ business’s assets (he was a friend, about 15 years in the business) and one of those items is 4TB worth of music. It will take me ages to sift through all of it and I am trying to think of transporting around 1-2TB worth of it to my gigs as I judge the worthiness of the rest of the songs.

4

i tend to keep my current library very small… and backup all my tracks, so i will have no more then a thousand tracks on my laptop and thousands backed up on my hard drive :smiley:

5

This is fine if you are a booth DJ, but if you are doing gigs like weddings all you need is that “this is a very special song, do you have it moment” and you do, but it’s not on your local collection.

Maybe I just need to carry my core (500GB-1TB) and then setup a VPN to my home collection for those rare grabs that I need.

6

seagate makes those wireless HDD drives :smiley: you can connect to the internet at the venue or from home and access your music

7

My trakor library isn’t that large, however sub-folders are involved! I have House Music which has all my House, Electro, Techno, Tech, Breaks, Progressive, I have a Glitch folder which has Dubstep, Drum and Bass, Trap and Glitch Hop. I’ll just take a screen shot and show you guys!
Itunes, has all the music I’ve downloaded over the years, that aren’t Dj friendly. This will come very handly, I remember when somebody asked me for Too $hort - Gettin It, Thank goodness for Itunes

Screen shot 2013-02-13 at 1.30.59 AM.jpg
Screen shot 2013-02-13 at 1.30.59 AM.jpg205×280 9.06 KB

8

haha :smiley: i have 2 folders inside my DJ folder… “maybe” and “no” this states weather its music i play or music that i enjoy/need to back up and remove

9

You do realise that you can have multiple iTunes libraries?. …maybe this would help with your music management

I have a “DJing” library, & a “master collection” library. You could do similar, but just have your smaller DJing library matching to the cloud.

To switch between the two, hold down “Alt” when you start iTunes. You’re then given options to start up from different library’s or create a new one.

edit - this is on a mac. Not sure if the feature’s available on the PC version of iTunes.

10

I use the grouping field in Itunes to help distinguish between my “traktor” library and ituens library. I will tag all DJ music as “trakotr” in the grouping field. and these are the only songs that I put in traktor library

11

Mine basically goes like this for every genre

Tech House >
Warm-Up >
Slow Grooves
Funky
Latin
Melodic

ect…

Now I just apply that to every genre, it’s pretty OCD but it works.

12

Whoa. Thanks so much. This is exactly what I need.

13

Sorry to nudge in here and sound very amature… But without any nasty comments… can anyone please tell me the reason for having a track collection and not use the itunes library?

I have been Djing for years and pay no attention to the Track collection part or importing etc.

I simply have all my playlists in Itunes and work from them. Cue points all save etc. and I have not had a problem (that I know of) yet.

Can someone please tell me why I should be using the Track Collection instead of just working from Itunes?

Cheers
M

14

There is nothing wrong with working in iTunes, that is what I do right now and after pondering what I should do I have decided to keep this part of my methodology. I am meticulous about my tagging and build a lot of smart playlists based off that data.

15

But does saving the playlists in Track Collection have any benefits as opposed to working in Itunes? I just don’t see the point if I have already made the playlists in Itunes just.