Ultimate Track Organization

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Ultimate Track Organization

So I have backed up ALL my music and cleared my itunes catalog, and now I want to basically start from scratch with my music collection. 99% of my collection is in folder format by album and generally speaking ID3 tags are correct. I have not analyzed with Mixed in Key or anything yet.

I got a macbook last year and my music is somewhat “organized” by itunes… Meaning I have like 7 copies of everything and it’s wrecking everything!!! :slight_smile:

I am using Traktor and also want to be able to use my itunes too for daily listening…

How would you organize from scratch???

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Why would you have 7 copies of everything? Multiple imports without file organization or something?

If you import it all into iTunes, it will either move it to the defined folder, leave it in place, or copy it to the folder and leave it in place.

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EDIT: Oh, you have a Mac. Yeah, I suppose that make sense since most folks around here do. Ugh, it’s late… I should stop posting.

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Pretty much to sort any problem with my iTunes on my mac I use one of many apple scripts on Doug's AppleScripts » dougscripts.com . They can pretty much automate any tedious task such as finding and deleting duplicates, removing track numbers from track names, changing track name from “Song - Artist” to track name “Song” artist name “Artist” etc.

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So what i dont understand, why would u use Itunes to organize ur music? Y not just use OS x File system, or the os x equivalent of windows explorer? I would only use itunes for my personal music, I.E. the music that gets synced to my Ipod. Y not just organize it via genre or sub-genre?

I have everything setup by genre, then by sub genre. So I have house, then Deep, prog, tribal, etc.

Also, keying everything really helps alot to.

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Mine works.

<albums><0-Z><artist><release>(disc)<##> - - - ().

<soundtrack/compilation><release>(disc)<##> - - - ().

Where () are applicable.

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Go through everything by hand.

Fix ID3 tags, keep highest bitrates, delete duplicates etc…

I’m anal retentive so I have to do it that way.

I do it once or twice a year.

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Same Same …

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www.tspotter.net

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I always thought this was the only way…

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I do it manually myself.

A buddy of mine runs his main computer through Linux (red hat, the company he works for). He has a bunch of scripts that basically go through and automatically clean up the filename (takes the random numbers off the beginning of the filename, and re-arranges it so it’s artist - track using _ and + so their are no spaces). I really like his system, and it works very quick for him for a lot of tracks.

He still has to manually go through and make sure that the actual names and such are CORRECT. If something is wrong to begin with, it can’t fix that. But I keep telling him he should compile it into a program and market it, even open-source.

But until that day, nothing really beats the precision of doing it manually.

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WOW! Thanks! I didn’t think I had actually posted this question, but I guess I hit send!

Just got back from a work trip so I’ll se what works best and post back.

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I’m building myself up to doing a massive purge of my music collection and getting rid of as much of the crap as I can. It’s 50GB atm, and it’s not the size that’s the problem but the frequency of musical turds that have turned up in compilation albums!