Sharing my Music sorting procedure

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Sharing my Music sorting procedure

I was asked the following question by a member and with my long reply, I though it would be decent to share with you all.

a lot has been covered, & there may be some stuff people can add :slight_smile:

Some of it is very noobish, but I wanted to explain in its entireity :open_mouth:

This is how I do it & may be of help & guidence to some.

Yes.

My procedure as of late has been a long but rewarding one.

Once I got the hang of itunes (wasn’t a fan at first but with some tweaking, ie settings so it dosn’t duplicate all my tracks etc.) I’m a fanboy :smiley:

Once I download a track I do the following (some is personal preference)

  • ananlyse in Mp3Gain
  • analyse in MIXED IN KEY
  • drag to itunes (finalise tags & give rating)
  • Import to traktor (there are a few steps I go to before this, as follows)

Once in itunes I select the track, right click & then select get info. (this is where I make sure all my tagging is up to date, mainly genre & key for the smart playlists)

NOTE: I also give my tracks another listen & give a rating. I keep it simple and relevants across the genres rather than specific ratings for each catagory.

1 star = soft/mellow/chillaxed etc.. through to 5 star = the big Big heavy hitters etc.

Inside of itunes I have smart playlists of all my genres. So once a track is tagged it will automatically put it in its specific smart playlist.

smart playlists are great as it keeps things organised.

then it is just a matter of creating any playlist you want and dragging your tracks into that. wala :smiley::smiley:

A good rule to follw once you get on top of all your tags is what I stick to , it was in the blog a while ago.

TAG OFTEN, TAG EARLY.

now this has been a tedious progress as I have rinsed and repeated many times till I was happy with the results. But once I got use to itunes it all fell into place.

1st thing I would recomend, and what i did is in the following order.

  • clear traktors collection and update.

  • clear itunes collection and update

  • fine tune all your preferred settings in traktor and export the tsi file (you will find the big export button at the bottom of setting) this way you always have that clean slate to fall back on

  • fine tune all itunes settings

so now everything is a clean slate to make a fresh start. this is a big help IMO.

Next steps

  • import all your tracks to itunes
  • create smart playlists ( I have everything from pop, rock, easy listening, drum & bass, tech house, psy/goa, House etc…) you will see these fill up as you go.

sounds daunting but itunes sorts this out for you based on the tags
here is a good link SMART PLAYLISTS

  • from here I can make my own playlists a lot quicker by browsing through the smart playlists

take your time with it so you only have to do it once, it may take a few nights and a few cold ones, and mayby a bit of nagging form the wife in regard’s spending no quality time together, but thats another story :wink:

I even make sure all my genres are listed the same. lets use Hip Hop & Rap for an example..

*sometimes it is tagged as hip-hop/rap and sometimes it is tagged with rap & hip hop or whatever. you can select all of them in itunes at once and change so the tags are the same. same procedure select all and choose get info, itunes will ask if you want to change multiple files, select YES then you can change and fine tune the genre. (it is impotant that you only do this for Genre though) eg. Rap/Hip-Hop, this will keep things even tidyer and narrow down your smart playlists. with all the sub genres these days, it can get a bit confusing. :confused:

So now you have everything sorted. thankgod :smiley: you can move onto traktor.

close itunes as you can access this through traktors browser.

Inside of traktor in the browse column, scroll down to itunes and select, you will now see all of your hardwork inside of itunes, including playlists and subfolders. hooray :slight_smile:

you can then select on a folder and import to collection, traktor works better and smoother when tracks are imported to collection.

you only need to import once, and once you have you can browse through your itunes folders and play form there.

On a side note, it is not uncommen for me to clear traktors collection on occasion and only import what I need. (also best done prior to performance)

Also another good thing to have selected in traktor is to check consistency on start up. A consistency check will show you what tracks are missing then you can reimport the missing ones
missing tracks are caused by moving files in your hard drive dont panic though as traktor is only a host and does not actually store your track, simply points to & plays them from the location on your Hard drive/computer.

I hope This has been of some help.

Good luck & always happy to help to the best of my knowledge :smiley:

P.S. a special thanks to all the forum members who I have gained this handy information from. and thankyou to the community for making it a great place to be a part of. THANKYOU :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue:

2

hey mate, at what volume level do you recommend setting the tracks to?

3

this is a great insight Zaniac, thanks for taking the time to post

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Thanks for the tips mate. I didnt realize that by clicking get info it would grab the MIK key tag. I’ve been using regular playlist for a while mainly to sort out new sets. Never really got my head around multi tagging till now to get into smart playlists but I’ll have to give it a crack.

5

I stated at 96db after reading this article from the blog.
get the most out of your music library

I Now use 94db with autogain turned off & find I have best results

Here are a couple more threads I would recommend reading if interested.
this one
That one

6

thanks zaniac, I watched the smart playlist video but I feel dj Endo over does it with the smart playlist system.

For me smart playlist is a way to find tracks to use in a set easier and make a playable playlist, but that guy has so many smart playlist he might as well not have any at all. In my opinion its like he doesn’t know how to find tracks, or how he usually finds tracks and so in turn has tried to organize EVERY possibility in case he changes the way he does things, it was truly insane the amount of parameters he has.

so just to be sure, mp3 gain will change the levels of the mp3 and save it at the files source, and when you import those mp3’s into itunes, itunes also saves them at this level? as I tried it and it said a bunch of the tracks already were clipping (is that indicated by the red ‘y’?) so I re-did the levels at 86db but in itunes I still feel there is a noticeable difference between the levels of some tracks.

EDIT* Just another thing, since I have already run about 30 tracks through at 86 and would now prefer to shift it to around 94 as thats seems to be the general go, can a run them through again at 96 and would those levels then be updated in itunes automatically?

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ha ha, yeah endo’s is intense.

I only have Smart lists of GENRE, KEY, KEYED OPTIONS

The rest I make my own.

make sure you have clipping turned off, there is a few that still clip and is causing some confusion as discussed IN THIS THREAD

8

Thank you for sharing your method. I can’t use itunes with the music format 90% of my tunes are in. :disappointed:

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What format are your tunes in? There are tools out there to convert. Unless your talking vinyl? :slight_smile:

10

flac or oggvorbis most likely

11

Noob question… wouldn’t you loose your cue points and stuff if you cleared your collection?
…and…
well said,
DJ Tech Tools is awesome. filled with bright people who are very helpful.

12

Good question, but all of the cues points, grids etc are saved in the id3 tag of the track. So clearing Traktors collection is fine.

13

good tips. I’ve been thinking about a way to unify my music collection under iTunes. At the moment I use Traktor, iTunes and rekordbox and it’s all a bit time consuming. I’d rather use iTunes because the smart playlist thing is cool. The only problem is I HATE iTunes. I guess I’ll just have to get over that :stuck_out_tongue:

14

I was in this boat as well. Now Im a fanboy.

Once you set up the smart playlists its all too easy.

For example Im on a tech house buzz. And have been building my library. now that I have a genre smartplayist, as soon as I drag a tech house tracks into itunes it goes straight to the tech house playlist. From there I can search by date added etc…

15

yeah the smart playlists thing is cool and traktor doesn’t have that. At the moment I have three different folders for different eneryg levels (1 = low energy, 3 = high), and I drag and drop mp3s into each of these folders. Once they are in the correct folder I drag and drop them into Traktor. It is a bit slower than smart playlists would be! It is also far less dynamic in the event I want to create a folder outside this concept. I.e. a ‘tech house’ folder. Dragging and dropping files is too awkward compared to group-editing tags.

16

:^ just be sure to set up all itunes preferences the way you want to before you get right into it. Eg. the main reason I avoided itunes to begin with is that i didnt want it to duplicate my music as I dont buy a lot from itunes. But now I have set my options to not duplicate. That little hurdle holding me back is now gone. Ah the simple things :smiley:

P.S are you a Wellington local. I am from Wellington myself (Wainuiomata)

17

Thanks for writing this up! I’ve been meaning to clean up my library but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I really like the idea of having chill tracks and your dance bangers/anthems organized.

18

yep I’m from mt vic! you play out around here much? there are some good house gigs on these days.. mi casa tu casa, what happened to the techno, etc.

19

I left Wellington mid 2007 Im creeping up 30 now. back when I was running reckless around town there was a big group of my friends who played and partied all night to Hardhouse. as much as I enjoyed that scene, I would always drop it for a good gig of breaks & d&b at my favourite club in town (also where I met my wife) Sandwidges.

More often than not you would find me there ripping up the D floor :smiley: (albiet awkwardly flapping my arms around lol)

20

sandwiches is still going strong :slight_smile: they added a mexican restaurant into the bar bit, which is a bit weird (good nachos though).

soo… was just about to start setting up iTunes and then realised when in traktor that they still haven’t added in the cover art column in the browse area. or is that just my traktor being crap?