Problem..collecting 3 years of music and finally coming to the conclusion you need to sort out your **** … better then you had it until now
wanted solution: preferably a program that has a easy way of scrolling thru a track very quickly, and the possibility to move that track (or a kopie) to a destination folder…thought about using the preview browser in traktor which is ideal for quick scanning but its not possible to move or copy tracks from there to different folders (is it ? )
Import ALL of your music into iTunes Library WITHOUT allowing iTunes to move files and group by artist/album (disable it in the settings).
Then, you can scroll through your tracks, listen and preview (and skip through each song on the waveform view in iTunes), BUT, you can also edit the “checkbox” tag in iTunes while you’re listening.
Put a check in the checkbox for every track you want to KEEP.
Once you’ve been through all your tracks and “checked” the ones you want to keep, create a new SMART PLAYLIST in iTunes that will return all of the tracks with a check in the checkbox.
Then, open the Smart Playlist, select all, and click-drag to a new folder on your desktop.
You’ll now have your original collection still in place, and you’ll also have a folder that only contains the ones you wanted to keep.
I’d also add something in the comments field in all those tracks that you’re keeping just to make it clear that they’ve survived a “cull”.
While you’re at it, run those checked tracks through BeaTunes to tidy up all of your naming and genre tags. BeaTunes is well worth the money.
You could probably do this using Traktor and it’s own Playlists along with the Preparation List - but until Traktor has native smart playlists, I’d use iTunes.
This…this is the way i now add new tracks…within my techno folders there are like 20 subfolders…like intro, close. dub. hard. minimal, acid, weird, old, remix older songs
etc etc ..as i acquire a new track i put it in the right folder(s) meaning 1 track can be in multiple folders…Yes i know wast of room if you tag them correctly…but that the next step …so i will give i tunes a go..when properly tagged i asume its easy to move the tracks with a specific tack to a certain location..
You don’t need to move or duplicate ‘em. Just create smart lists based on tags, and the track will show up in all of the Smart Lists where the conditions are met.
So you can have one file (say 10mb in size) showing up in 100 different Smart Lists, but only occupying 10mb of space on your HD.
Think of Smart Play Lists as folders. You browse and load on Yraktor from the iTunes mode, where ALL of your Smart Playlists show up as individual nodes on the tree (just like a folder).
If native Smart Playlists are not included in the Traktor re-vamp that’s due for the end of 2018/beginning of 2019, I’ll be thinking about changing software. It’s unbelievable that Traktors library management is the worst out there.
Cull your library. Be fucking brutal. I went from >10,000 Tracks to <5,000 over the course of a couple of months. I had to do it in a couple of passes. First, I went through everything I had, and sorted it into “Love and Keep”, “Maybe/Don’t Know” and “Delete now”. Once I’d deleted a few hundred that I knew I wouldn’t play again, it made it easier to sort through the “Maybes” and sort those into “Keep” or “Delete” (some maybes got a bit of a stay of execution and stayed in the maybe folder for further deliberation!).
Indespensible tools;
Directory Opus (<that app is fucking incredible!!!)
iTunes
BeaTunes
MP3Tag
Between those 4 pieces of s/w, you’ll soon whip your collection into shape.
I recently went through 10 years of tracks in traktor (3.4 FTW) and culled the library down significantly just getting rid of double+triple+quad ups.. like 3000 tracks ish
still around 15k tho lol.
better then you had it until now