Articles
Organizing A Digital Music Library by Josh Lloyd, Serato
Taking charge
For many people, a music collection gradually accumulates, is spread over various drives, folders, or even computers.
To get organized you need to take charge of where your files live, and have a process for dealing with new songs as they're added.
Decide on a home for all your music.
And make it.
This could be the default Music (or My Music) folder already on your system, a Music folder you create elsewhere on your boot disk, just the root of your external hard drive, or wherever suits you.
Think about how you select tracks
Organizing your library to suit your needs can be approached from a workflow / productivity standpoint.
Consider how you use your library while DJing:
- When selecting the next track to play at a gig, what factors affect your decision ?
- What is your process for finding suitable candidates?
If you only play pre-determined sets, your process would be something like: 'find the next song in the crate'.
Commonly however, we enjoy having a few options for where to take a set, and the approach for finding tracks might vary greatly, depending on what kind of gig it is.
For a given situation outline the basic criteria you use, and sum up the action each currently requires.
For example "DJ Ex-sample" often plays a 90s Electro club night at 1AM, and might have the following:
| What I want | What I do to get it |
| Track must fit the theme of the gig | Open the browse panel and select the 90s Electro genre |
|
BPM within +/- 2% |
Sort by BPM column / apple+L to find the current song |
| The crowd to go nuts | Read the response early on and use my selection skills |
| Play it safe for a while but retain the crowd | Put together a crate of anthems beforehand and play from that. |
But at his weekly Wednesday night playing to a few friends in a bar, Ex-sample's workflow is more like:
| What I want | What I do to get it |
| Play some requests | Search the 'All' crate |
|
Mini-set of favorites from over the years to finish |
Make a new crate and drag suitable tracks into it over the night. Last 30 mins played mainly from this crate. |
Dependencies
Identify what is required for your techniques to work. E.g for the browse panel to find all the tracks in your library in a certain genre, they must be tagged with the correct genre; so part of the DJ Ex-Sample's preparation should be correctly tagging his entire library and all incoming tracks.
