Way too many tracks, must be a better way to find my music.

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Way too many tracks, must be a better way to find my music.

I take it most of you have used Genius on iTunes at some point or another. I’m looking for something with similar functionality that will create Traktor compatible playlist based on genre, key, bpm, etc.

Anyone know if there’s such an app out there?

2

I really think that’s part of the fun and enjoyment of being a selector. If you just want it automatic… I don’t know. I consider DJing to be 50% skill, 50% selection. It’s not overtly complicated… but it’s an incredibly important part of how your personal flavor turns out.

3

You could always save off the genius playlist and put it back together in traktor. Thats as close as youre gonna get.

djing is really all about selection though, no machine can beat a good dj.

4

Delete tracks you don’t love. Seriously I don’t understand how people can have such huge libraries.

5

Trainspotter. Works with the Traktor collection. Does dynamic playlists by key, genre, whatever you like. also does key detection and discogs lookup.
I use it all the time

6

Fully agree. Some people’s library’s are huge and full of low quality crap. Think back to vinyl when it was quality not quantity.

7

if you don’t know your tracks inside and out, you really shouldn’t be using them regularly

8

I like to have a good amount of music on hand because at sone gigs you never know. That being said I sort all my music into genres they from that make sets that contain the most recent music of that genre that I like say about 100-200 of my fav tracks at the moment and add and delete from those list. So I’ll have a house, then house set, trance, then trance set and so on.

9

sorting by date is a good idea.

10

Don’t know of apps, and frankly, I wouldn’t trust it to keep tracks in a way that correlates with the way my brain remembers where things are.
I organize all my EDM tracks by date I purchased, and then into multiple playlists.

11

I haven’t been DJ’ing all to long, but my library recently hit 1000 songs. Then I transferred over my favorites to my iPod… and was left with 347. That’s still hundreds of songs to work with, but damn… I don’t remember downloading that much crap.

12

there are some really useful articles (think they’re called Power Tips) on how to use smart playlists to make finding track of a similar style easier

For example I have a bunch of smart playlists set up to select all tracks where the genre includes Funk and that are rated 4 or 5 stars. As I set the genres and stars myself. It picks out my favourite tracks. I also use MiK and the key and bpm are both in the comments field so that can be an aid

Then again I sometime just play what feels right … josh is right, know your music.

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Sorry, forgot to add … the articles are on DJTT …

14

a few years ago before i lost one of my collections on a failed hdd i would sort all my popular ‘bangers’ and ‘tracks from ministry cds’ by month and year which seemed to work well when playing to (younger and more ignorant) commercial dancefloors. worked well enough.

over the years i’ve tried many different approaches to filing my mp3’s and filling burned cd’s… all have worked well, but when you play everything enough it doesn’t matter how or when it was filed where - my brain knew where to find it!

15

Soo true… My musid collection is a mess but my main 100 songs are spread across about 5 folders which specific names like dubstep house electro gay (non are in the right folders though) but if i want a song i know exactly where it is

16

I’ve got a massive music collection coz I love music.

What I’m looking for is a better way to filter away the tracks I don’t want, leaving me with say 50 tracks that have close key/bmp etc.

I’m looking at this as an inspiration tool when jamming at home. I’m thinking of it as a way to find and rediscover tunes in my collection.

Apparently Virtual DJ has a feature called geniusdj that can do what I want but there’s zero chance of me buying Virtual DJ, I’m traktor to the core.

Thanks to everyone that posted usefull tips:smiley:

17

I dont have a clue really… This is all i do… My car radio runs a sd card… I pick say 50 random songs that i dont know too well… And just stick them on it every so often… Ill listen to these for like 2 weeks and when i find a song that i really like or someone goes wow whats that.. I note it down and gets added to a play list which i then free style with other songs to see what works well together

18

good way of doing it… im pretty sure theres a way to do it on the ipod too while listening using star ratings and then anything with one star is taken from the playlist next time you sync. i read it somewhere yonks ago for the ipod classic.

i’d suggest making up playlists of 10-15 songs and listening to them 10 times in a row each, if you notice you start skipping to the next song after the first 3-4 times - delete those tracks.

19

If you’re already using Smart playlists then just import those into Traktor before your gigs. You’ll have to delete the old traktor playlist, but that shouldn’t be an issue because you’ll be importing it again with the better, stronger, faster playlist.

20

i love how people think that having a million tracks is a good thing…