I’m spinning a few tunes at a bar tonight, and rather than go through the arsehole of rigging up TSP alongside my mates Serato setup for what is essentially an excuse to drink for free whilst we play old funk and soul records and chat crap with one another, I was going to take a USB stick/HDD with some tunes on and just play off that.
I’ve already got the Serato s/w on my laptop, and all my tunes are analysed. (I don’t have an SSL box, but the theory being that I can plug my laptop into someone else’s Serato setup rather than being the only Traktor DJ who wants to rig things up when I’m playing a night)
What I want to do is either export my Serato library to a HDD, or a selection of playlists onto a USB stick that I can plug into my mates laptop and just play off, without having to do a bunch of analysis.
What steps to I need to perform to do this?
All the playlists in Serato are the ones that Serato imports directly from iTunes - I’m assuming I’ll need to create crates/smart crates to mirror the iTunes playlists? Can I rename smart crates to match the names of the iTunes playlists I was having trouble doing this last night when I tried.
Once I’ve go the playlists in Serato, how do I export the tunes ande the analysis files associated with them?
I use both, but i have not done this myself. My friend has though.
Simply copy all the analyzed tracks onto a USB. Once you plug it into the laptop of your friend u sohuld be able to see i in the file explorer on. If serato is on when you do this it will lag the visuals a light bit. So i advise to have it pluged up before serato is first loaded.
The same applied for an external hard drive.
Even more ideally, i think u should copy all the music to a folder on the desktop before the gig starts. That way u have a backup source in case the usb, external is accidentally disconnected.
fwiw - I’ve been pointed at http://serato.com/howtos/scratchlive/1953/how-to-move-your-scratch-live-library-to-an-external-drive to move my Serato library to a HDD, which I’ve no problem doing, my only concern is that when I plug my library into my mates Mac and Recover Lost Files I’ll end up filling his library with my shit and it’ll be a horrendous job to clean it up. Eitehr that or Serato will get confused at the presence of two libraries (his on his Mac’s internal drive, and mine on my external drive)
He’s a serious DJ (one of the Ninja tune residents) and I’ll be in bad books if I fuck his machine up
No-one semes to be able to tell me how to move individual playlists either, just the entire library.
You can just browse the lbrary off the external drive as I recall. It’s been some time since I played with Serato but I had a mate come by a couple times and stick in a USB and just play. Don’t remember anything messing up my library either – I think serato was smart enough to know when it was browsing an external disk. Still, a safer way as mentioned above is just copy the files to a folder on his desktop. Import into serato in its own crate and then just play off that crate. After you leave he can delete the files or just leave them there and ignore your crate until the next time you want to play.
I find it really hard to believe you can’t just plug in a usb stick and start mucking about. It seems like an obvious and simple task that such a complex program should be capable of.
