Rather than hijack djsharp’s thread regarding the building of a library, I wanted to get everyone’s take on the following…
As I’m sure most of you have a large collection of music, I’m guessing you also
don’t have all of it on your laptop.
I use a set of tools that seem to work for me…
MP3Rename - A free tool for renaming MP3s (duh) I use it mainly for batch renaming…I do not however use it for tagging. Available at www.nodesoft.com
Tag&Rename - A not free tool I use for tagging in batches…I’ve found it lacks in the “Rename” area, but I use MP3Rename for that anyways.
Easy CD-DA Extractor - A not free tool I use this for ripping, conversion, and burning
The above tools are fine for me, but somehow I can’t help but think there’s a better way to browse my collection than using Windows Media Player and Explorer… I’ve seen integrated music management software like Helium and MediaMonkey, but I haven’t used it.
I’m not a fan of iTunes (perhaps someone here can give me a compelling reason to use it)
I’m just started DJing and had to organize all my music in someway. I did it via iTunes and I really love it!
First of its awesome with the smart playlists that can organize the music for me just by setting up the right settings, its just to make correct ID3-tags when inserting a new track to the library and the rest is history.
I use MixedInKey for renaming .mp3s after ID3-tags, BPM and key. I then insert BPM- and Key-information to the ID3-tags and it’ll pop up in iTunes.
The second thing thats awesome using itunes is that its fully working together with Traktor Pro.
I might just have to give iTunes another look… thing is, I’ve never used it (or felt I had to) since I don’t own an iPod (dun dun dun!!!). I also buy most of my music from Beatport, Traxsource and Juno. The club pays for several subscriptions that arrive via CD, and I rip using easy CD-DA Extractor for that.
I had to succumb to iTunes finally because of the Traktor integration – being able to go about my other business during the day and knock any tracks I like into a playlist which I can pull-up in Traktor later is too convenient. It depends on your work-flow, though. For me it works. I don’t use it for tagging, though.
For tagging, I keep everything in simple A/B/C/etc. folders and use MP3Tag to initially properly tag them (label, catalog, genre) after purchase. MP3Tag has some nice scripts that can query Discogs directly. Then I run a BPM scan so I can see BPMs for everything in everything. Aside from that, I don’t look at the actual file again unless I need to make some kind of change.
+1 for iTunes. Like Photojojo I use iTunes and mixed in key. After that I run all tracks through Platinum Notes. In three steps my tracks are ready to go.My library is over 150gb and itunes handles it nicely. Its not perfect but nothing ever is…
I was a die-hard Winamp user personally, so I made the change really reluctantly. How it works with Traktor is going to depend on how your music is setup and how you have iTunes setup.
For example, I have my music tagged with an identifier in the comment file for Album, Release (Single/EP), Mix, etc. iTunes can then make an auto-playlist for anything with that comment. So I can browse via those categories.
Here is a screen shot, if that helps. The first part of the list is all auto-playlists that are built by iTunes. The bottom part (starting with #Streams) is stuff I manually put into playlists. I hated to drop Winamp as my main player, but I can’t argue with the ability to do this:
All my tracks simply go into folders according to genre. When run through Virtual DJ they are automatically arranged by bpm. I can edit the tags and create playlists there as well.