The best way to manage your music on your computer?
Hi friends
I wanted to get a few tips on how to organize music by folder I play electronic music and have a bit of a hard time remembering all artists
I’d love to get help
Thanks (:
Only take a selection of them for DJing. You don’t need all thousands of them.
External hard drive > folder for genre > dated folders
I organise mine by genre and then have a separate folder called ‘New Downloads’ that I put everything into before sorting… This way if you want to play your newer, fresher beats - they’re all there together 
At the end of the day - organise them in a way that works for you as you’re the only person who needs to know what’s what…
One folder.
PROPERLY tagged tunes.
iTunes Smart Plsylists.
This here since I switched to itunes I can see a very big change of my work flow for the positive its been ultimately very good for allowing me to keep good origination and ultimately allows me to make playlists within minutes that come in handy… All my tracks have key and bpm in comments so it helps lots I haven’t tried smart playlists but maybe will
Just did a smart playlist very impressive id say too bad it can’t read the key field if it could that’d be even better for automation
I don’t use the key field for my keys - I use the “Album” field. That way, you CAN have smart playlists based on Key info.
+1 (Mostly)
I have lots of folders.
I use a TON of tags.
iTunes Smart Playlists are the BEST feature of iTunes.
Here is an example of how tags can be used to your advantage with smart playlists to better manage your music.
iTunes can be used to manage music that is purchased from anywhere, in more than just mp3 format.
mp3@320, played with a reasonable sound interface, through an otherwise clean signal path, does sound reasonable in (almost) all cases. If you are filling arenas and touring full time, by all means use wav files. If you can source music in a lossless format, by all means. Seek the highest level of quality that you can reasonably afford to get. Just be aware that there are VERY few good places to stop once you start down that road.
There is a misnomer that bigger and louder sound systems are higher fidelity. In general terms, the highest fidelity listening experience will be at moderate sound levels, in a dedicated listening room, with HEAVY acoustic treatment, and a properly setup and tuned sound system. Anything that raises the noise floor in the room (people talking, HVAC, beer coolers, ice machines, pin ball or video games, mechanical bulls, you know whatever you find at your local club) degrades the fidelity of the listening experience.
I read these managing music threads and get instant anxiety. I’ve yet to organize my 2000+ tracks. Dreading it.
I use iTunes to manage roughly 7800 tracks… Lossless vs MP3 format… I have yet to see where this is a reason why someone who doesn’t play on hi fidelity systems would opt this path… For me to purchase my library in a lossless format would be into the thousands and for what when I side by side on my studio monitors the difference it unnoticeable to a trained hear that has experience with Hifi… This why I don’t care much for the argument…
That being said anything below 320k MP3 or 256aac is not acceptable… This is kind of a really bad situation for guys that have a huge vinyl library they converted to MP3 prior to 2003 as up until then 192k MP3 were considered superb quality in most circles… I for one was stupid and when converted by once very expansive vinyl library and promo cd library to MP3 I did so at 192 which mean they are now worthless on most anything that provides even marginal sound quality:… Hate it if you will and I have been slowly switching my library to wav but it is very expensive and very difficult to find at times
I first ripped my music in the mid to late 90’s to mp3@160kbps. I only had a 20GB hard drive and anything bigger than 160 I couldn’t get enough music on there to matter.
Around Y2K, I re-ripped my whole collection to mp3@192. Higher bitrates were not producing any difference that I could notice, and It was hard to get everything to fit only the 80GB hard drive I had.
Around 2005, I started ripping new music to mp3@224. I converted the “core” collection as well.
By 2010 I said “!@#$@#!$ it!” I re-ripped everything to FLAC. I keep my music and video collection on two external NAS systems with 2TB of storage each. Now I convert “as needed” at whatever makes the most sense. wav for work in Ableton. 320kbps for the DJ computer. 192kbps for the iPhone.
Yeah for my iOS devices I dump 320mp3 into my iTunes Match and then it will either be a 256 AAC or 320mp3 for things it didn’t match… Works out fine for me best thing will be when they open up ther true Hifi codec to match and convert my entire library to near lossless Apple format which is fine by me
Do 10-20 tracks a day. It might not seem like much, but it’s better than not doing it for the next year. The hardest part is getting started.
I have actually tried once, but got overwhelmed trying to determine which genre to put some tracks in. Definitely suffer from OCD when it comes to that.
I can relate. I’ve been fighting my OCD for years. Sometimes it’s better just to start. You can always change midstream.
Lightweight.
When I re ripped my entire CD collection to Lossless, I had to retag and check 15,000.
But now its amazing. Want to build a smart playlist of every song in my library from 1962-1965 with the word ‘shoe’ in it?
Takes but a second.
This. But, also:
The more you tag your tracks, the more your process will develop and become refined. When this happens - the first tracks you’ve done seem “not quite done as well” as the later ones.
My suggestion - pick 100 tracks to go through, with the intent of perfecting your process. TAKE LOTS OF NOTES!!! When you’re happy with your process - delete all the tags from that 100 tracks, and start over - using your new, perfected process.
Then start going through your library a chunk at a time (10 or 20 tracks at a time), and religiously tag the shit out of 'em!!!
i do it by genre, then sub genre, then by the style within the genre
So, as for management…I use iTunes for DJ music. It’s the only stuff iTunes touches, and now that Traktor reads the iTunes library directly, everything is just simpler.
New tracks get tagged and then put wherever…I don’t actually care as long as they’re under some folder I know (in my case /Volumes/Music, which is a 2nd SSD in my MBP). I use iTunes tagging and smart playlists to narrow stuff down and just build a crate to play from just like I did with vinyl, except that it’s quicker and I don’t have to physically move things. Every now and then, I purge this based on Traktor’s play counts and whether or not I remember the song. That works well enough for me, but I don’t really take requests or need that much music. Occasionally, I’ll also just clear it out and start over…agian, just like vinyl.
My pleasure listening music is on my NAS sorted like (shared folder)/ARTIST/ALBUM/tracks. I recently went on a huge purge and copied everything that was flac/alac/wav/aiff into a new shared folder and pointed all my stuff at that instead of the folder that still has stuff I downloaded 12 years ago back when internet speeds and drive prices were so much worse that mp3s made sense. The NAS has a media server that transcodes the lossless stuff to wav and handles the metadata, so I generally just use that and it’s web client to actually play music.
At some point, I’ll generate a list of eveything I had that didn’t make the cut and either re-rip or re-buy the stuff I actually want.
The DJ side of the purge was pretty simple…I wrote a script to scan that /Volumes/Music directory and delete all of the mp3s. I have a list in iTunes of stuff I need to think about replacing (everything with a file missing icon).
If you can’t hear the difference between mp3s and uncompressed/lossless, do yourself a favor and never learn how. I can hear it on worn out car stereos and cheap earbuds now. It’s not a general quality thing, and it’s not quiet. mp3 compression causes audible artifacts that are annoying as hell once you hear them for the first time…you know, assuming you know what those kinds of sounds are supposed to sound like.