Digital DJs: how do you organise music?

Music
21

Really interesting this. I’m still experimenting, but I do some of the stuff suggests in here, one big folder of 100-120 tracks for a 3 or 4 hour set, with previous sets saved. I also have a ‘monthly’ folder and new stuff and old stuff that is new to me goes in there, in BPM order. I’ve also been building lists for (roughly) 70-105 bpm tracks if I’m playing early doors, so I can keep playing around the lower bpms until there’s enough people in to not quite let rip, but take it up a couple of notches.I also have a ‘end of night’ a ‘sunset’ folder that I’m building up. I’ve been thinking of making a folder of tracks with ‘swirly intros’ with no beats, because they’re great for changing the tempo up or down a bit more dramatically without the dreaded horses hooves…

The other main thing I do is try and add the year of release. I tend to associate batches of tracks with certain eras that I went out a lot (over the last 30 years!) and if I’m not careful I could end up playing 3 in a row from 1992 or 2001 or 2011. So this acts as a check on this for my almost 50 year old brain.

I just about understand harmonic mixing, but I’d like to be able to do it from memory, and if you’re moving the bpm up or down by more than about +2 it can be off anyway. I tend to listen to the next track through the cue now to see what it sounds like.

I’m glad CDJ’s tell you if you’ve already played a record that night, if it is a new one then you might want to play it twice or more over 4 hours, but otherwise it’ll just make you look like you forgot!

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22

I store all my WAVs on external hard drives (with 2 back-ups) and just categorise them into genres. I replicate that same folder structure in Rekordbox and then save onto an external hard drive.

I struggled with formatting for months, but finally found a program to format a 1Tb Samsung T7, and now I have everything on it.

I still create a specific playlist for a radio show or gig, but then have all my digital files on the T7 for back up.

FLAC files have also meant quality of digital in a basic form is much improved. No more mp3s - even obscure stuff is available on FLAC files!

I still buy records occasionally and CDs, but just rip tracks to digital as soon as I get them.

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23

Also, I do what Bill does as well - put the artist AND track name into the title, makes it easier to search. Fuck all that first name, surname, track title, album title, etc. nonsense. Keep it simple! :blush:

24

i have a whole mindset around this. i call those tracks “tentpoles”.

no matter the venue or setting or purpose, there’s probably no less than four tracks you probably want to feature - but you might have to build up to them, and you are certainly going to have to gracefully come away from them, so the tracks around them should be complimentary but not necessarily “same-y”.

tentpoles don’t have to be “big” - in fact they can be completely the opposite - downer tracks, breather tracks, etc. but you keep them in mind, and be ready to build around them in one way or the other, because you hope to feature them, for whatever their purpose.

it’s a simple theory and i don’t claim it in any way - but it’s the absolute opposite approach of a lot of the seemingly newer dj theory which is “all bangers, every one better than the last”.

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25

Love the idea of tentpole tracks, I used to do the same thing when I was only playing house, but with vocal tracks. I’d spend maybe half an hour building up to each one.

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26

Saw an amazing set by Osunlade at Whistlebump at the End where he did just that - played a big vocal track about every 45 minutes and then built up to (and down from) it with really deep stuff in between.

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27

I’m definitely curious to know what’s in the SEX DUNGEON…?

28

I also made a move over to RB recently, and am still trying to work out how to best organise files. The only thing I have set up that I find works quite well is a ‘PLAY THIS’ folder, where I stash about 20-30 new/interesting tracks that I’ve picked up and I think might guide how a set goes, or that people/me might be interested to hear. I use it as a sort of inspiration bucket to shift mood & tempo too, as there’s definitely a risk of having too much to choose from in digital format. Sounds like the tentpole approach.

29

Ha, nothing that exciting, tbh. It was named after a comment on a mix that went out as part of an all day takeover a few of us did during lockdown. My part was going out at around 2300 so I wanted to create the feeling of being spangled on a dancefloor. Or as someone said “It’s like I’ve done too much gear in a Belgian sex-dungeon!”. In fact, was that your quote @Dave ? :smiley:

Here’s the mix

Screenshot_20221124-104644_Mixcloud
Screenshot_20221124-104644_Mixcloud1080×1179 75.4 KB

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30

I’ve kept it relatively simple.

Firstly Artist - Track name (version) in song title for visibility and ease of selection (as half the time I know the artist but not the track , especially on albums)

1 Folder for the forthcoming gig / radio show

A second folder of new(to me) stuff for planning and dipping in and out of

Then three broad folders of Downtempo
Mellow soul / jazz
Livelier stuff

If I have anymore then I just get lost in a world of confusion

All loaded from RekordBox via playlists maintained in itunes where I do any conversion required

All backed up on an External hard drive

31

All my digital files are scattered across the floor in the wrong sleeves or in piles, lent against radiators. total mess

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32

this is a useful thread

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33

im still working through decades of digital pulls and am only now trying to build a lossless server for rekordbox, but one of the most helpful things for labelling digital music so its tagged right and easily read in the finder is “mp3tag” on mac os it really can scrub the file name in every way possible and pull proper tags from internet in any order you decide onto the file, since in rekordbox it maybe appear labelled right but it may have some beatport gibberish title and this handles all of it. very handy!

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34

This reminds me of playing with Sasha at Fabric in the early Noughties. His method of Djing was the complete opposite of mine. I like to have everything really well organised before I leave the house. Sasha, on the other hand, didn’t. He would turn up to the booth and about 20 minutes before he was due to start, he’d open his record box and tip everything out onto the floor, sleeves missing, records flying everywhere, he’d obviously just chucked everything in willy-nilly at his last gig and he’d start DJing like that. To me, it was absolute chaos, but it obviously worked for him.

A few years later, in 2005, me and Frank interviewed him and he’d moved to Ableton and he was saying it had completely changed how he played. So maybe the chucking records on the floor method wasn’t so great after all.

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35

Thanks for posting this Bill, it’s a topic that’s never far from my mind.

After Andrew passed away, I found that having to play up to 8 hour sets on my own quickly showed up the failings of my collection organisation.

Previously I had just organised my playlists chronologically, by month acquired, trying to keep them to a list of about 100-120 (a throwback to the physical record box days I guess).

In the last 18 months I’ve moved to a two usb system, using smart playlists.

So, I have one usb that contains the monthly playlists for the last year or so, but also I have what I call a moods playlist usb.

I’ve defined custom tags - something along the lines of Balearic, New Beat, Ethno, Cosmic, Acid, House, Deep House, Techno, Disco, Trippy, Dubby, Pumpers, Deep, Closing and a few more I don’t recall off the top of my head. I have made corresponding smart playlists with the same names.

By setting the rules for the smart play list, when I tag a track it gets added to the smart playlist with the same name. You can add multiple tags s tracks can be added to more than one playlist.

It sounds long but it only takes a few seconds to tag tracks as you add them to the collection.

It really gives me a lot of flexibility when I’m playing so, if I want to change the mood in a set I can go to the relevant mood playlist. It just works better than frantically scrolling…

There are a couple of good youtube tutorials about defining custom tags and smart playlists.

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36

A fascinating read, seems I might be more accomplished or experienced in some areas than I thought.

To start with I’ve only ever played out once. On that occasion I just kept going until I ran out of records in my bag, a worrying 3 hours worth.

Between 40 and 50 years ago my vinyl collection was neatly boxed and shelved in alphabetical order. Since then things have become chaotic and I rely on my computer files to find things.

About 20 years ago when I worked out how to cheaply connect a turntable to a computer I started to create digital files for the vinyl. Every new piece of vinyl was digitised before it was put on a shelf. I originally saved them as WAV files but when I saw how much memory it took changed to mp3, although I use the ‘insane’ setting on Audacity.

I still occasionally digitise tracks if I need them for a project such as some the guest mixes I’ve done for Rising Edge Radio.

I had some DJ lessons just over 10 years ago and failed miserably to beat match with turntables. I had slightly more success with the CDJs and liked the additional functions.

My mixer is just like a big junction box that allows me to connect multiple audio sources to the computer.

Back to the filing – almost everything is saved alphabetically by BPM, so all the genres are mixed up. Although I can often work out from the BPM what they are. These are saved on an external drive with some back-up on another drive.

I keep all my digital purchases on a download folder on my main tower PC and these are saved by date of purchase. Some of them are recorded on Discogs but not many.

Old mixes, parts of mixes and even some of your old mixes are saved in an archive file on an external drive. More recently I’ve been saving under specific file names on the hard drive of my PC.

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37

I always try to start the rare gigs I have in an ordered manner but always ends up with everything in the wrong sleeve. I’m better at remembering pictures than words so I mind sleeves or which track on a record it is based on the grooves. Digital isn’t as easy for that except that I’ve nearly adopted your digital naming system Bill due to all the Patreon downloads you’ve been firing out. Really handy to be able to visually identify them as a 'BB type ‘hing’. when in another playlist.

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38

I’m also a big fan of updating metadata on the track to help smart play lists do their thing. I first auto update the gaps in the track data and normalise the track title format using mp3tag or Picard, and then edit the ‘genre’ field to cover not just standard genres, but references specific to me (Levan, Knuckles, etc). My smart playlists then can have a lot of flexibility to scan 000’s of tracks in my library that fit both standard and customised search criteria. I find Media Monkey as a great player and smart playlist creator, which also syncs over multiple devices.

I am also absolutely insisting on a separate sex dungeon thread on this forum. Leather club favourites! Sleaze classics!

39

Great thread, Bill. My physical records are in genre’ish sections and actually lean towards energy levels/deepness. The further right you go the deeper they sound I guess.

Digitally, I have two drives, one is a backup, and an obsession with the Rekordbox tags. For organising my collection I tag every track I buy with a (vague) genre and also the year of purchase. I have sub genre tags for house like ‘deep’, acid’, electro’, ‘Detroit’, etc. I have way too many tags really because I find it impossible to define every track by genre.

I also use tags ‘current’ and ‘archive’ so I can filter out tracks that I don’t want to play in sets but can still access them if I need to.

I then also tag them for a scenario ‘bar set’, ‘club deep’, ‘daytime’. ‘club light’, ‘club sleazy’, ‘club harder’, and add another for energy level, such as, ‘peak time’, ‘early doors’, ‘warming up’, ‘late night’, ‘need a wee (smoke)’ etc etc. These tags are what I use when I’m playing out. They help me move between energy/vibe and jump between styles/genre’s easily.

I create intelligent playlists so tracks are automatically added to playlists of similar names, like Avalon and Sean do, but you can also use these tags on the fly using the filters on the newer Pioneer decks, combining and/or rules to filter using multiple rules/tags.

If I know exactly what time and where I’m playing I do tend to build smaller lists of 100 tracks or so manually as well as I like to have a vague plan, but the tags help me do that too.

I also have playlists of the tracks I’ve used for recorded mixes so I have some go-to mini sets that might be familiar to anyone that’s listened to my sets.

I think I’ve gone too far though and sometimes feel like I want to delete it all and start again, I really should just get a life :rofl:

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40

Aside from assigning a meaningful genre and creating topical crates (e.g. Weekend, Sex, Beach, Sunset, Last song, Revolution, Night/Moon, Scary, etc) the one thing that was most helpful for me was ensuring that the year is accurate.