Organizing a library of music is a huge part of DJing with products like Scratch LIVE. This article focuses on the finer points of maintaining a pristine collection of digital tracks.
What this article covers
This article covers organizing your music, both the actual files, and your library and crates inside Scratch LIVE.
And what it doesn't
This article does not cover obtaining, downloading or ripping music, encoding files, how to operate a computer, or using iTunes.
What is your library?
There are two things which you could call your music library: your collection of audio files (.mp3, .aiff, etc) and your Scratch LIVE library; visible as the information (tags) you see in the library panel.
When you drag a track to the deck, Scratch LIVE looks up the audio file you want, and starts playing the music in it.
As well as the tag information displayed in the library, Scratch LIVE maintains a database of references to your files .
Here is a diagram to assist:
Your database only works if it has the correct locations for all your files. Similarly your tags - the song name, artist, BPM, etc; are only useful if the information they contain is accurate.
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.
Analyze your process for building your library
And evaluate it.
This could be as simple as:
Some points to consider are:
- What are the ways music comes to be on your computer?
- Do you want ALL your music in Scratch LIVE?
- Should you have an evaluation stage for new music before spending time organizing and importing it?
- Do you sometimes get music in incompatible formats or of an unacceptable quality?
- Consider if your process is complex enough to warrant mapping out on paper, or in a flow chart.
- Periodically re-evalute this process
Once you have an idea about how you should be dealing with your music, you can move on to actually organizing it.
Organizing your Music on disk
Whether or not you organize your files is a personal choice. If you've ever had difficulty finding a particular file, or album of files, then you may see the value in it.
But with tools like Spotlight and Google Desktop, you might be fine without it. Personally, I like the idea of a nice tidy disk, and it makes manually backing up a breeze.
To the left is an example of a well organized file structure.
All the blocks in the diagram represent folders. The folders with a gold star have music files inside, all others are container folders, that is, they only have other folders in them.
The root level is basically your music folder. It can also be the root of your external drive, as long as that drive is only used for music.
The Root Genre Level is for DJs who play more than one genre of music (in broad terms). If you only play dance music, or only play drum 'n bass, this level can be left out.
The Folder levels can either contain music directly, or have further levels of folder organization, depending on the level of organization needed. For instance, this DJ has two separate 2Pac albums, so has decided to create a folder for each, inside a container folder called 2Pac. Conversely, he only has a few miscellaneous DJ Assault tracks, so they all live inside a folder called DJ Assault.
Note the fact that under Electronic, folder level 1 is a sub genre level, containing various kinds of Electronic music genres organized into folders, which in turn contain Artists and their music.
Contrast this with the folder _!Latest Bangers, a miscellaneous collection of recently obtained Hip Hop, which this DJ wants to access all together for the time being. Once those tracks are no longer appropriate for that folder, they will be recategorized into the general collection.
Wikipedia articles relevant to organizing files
ORGANIZING YOUR SCRATCH LIVE LIBRARY
Do you want all your music in Scratch LIVE?
From earlier, you should have answers to the following:
How do you get new music?
Do you want it all in your library?
Come up with a process for dealing with new music and put it into action. This should include building overviews, tagging correctly and adding to crates if appropriate.
Define crate structure
If you prefer working mostly from crates, making one for each type of gig you play is probably a good idea. Organize them into subcrates once they get past a couple of screens full.
Another popular way of organizing into crates is to make crate for each genre and subcrates for sub genres.
If you enable 'Include subcrate tracks' in the library panel of the setup screen, all the tracks in a crate including those in subcrates will be included in the track listing of the parent crate.
Tagging files
Take the time to correctly tag all your existing library, and include a tagging stage in your process for incoming tracks. One time saver is to use the browse panel to check that you're avoiding multiple entries for the same artist, album etc.
Relocate lost files
Relocate lost files is a handy tool to assist moving files around. If you move a bunch of files, rescan tags so Scratch LIVE notices they've moved, then drag their new location folder onto the relocate lost files button. Their location is updated (even across drives). Magic!
CONCLUSION
Organizing your library is naturally an ongoing, evolving process. Here are a few points to remember:
Process your library
Now you have some ideas about organizing your library, organize it! Sounds obvious doesn't it? Have a go and see how you find it. :-)
Maintain
This is a one-off task. You will inevitably notice things like tags which need editing, songs in the wrong crates, etc, as you continue DJing with your computer. Keep working on your library, and your files. As you get new music, organize as soon as you decide it should be in your Library.
Evolve
Re-evaluate what you're doing with your library from time to time, and how.
Backing up.
Your library is, or should be, precious! BACK IT UP! Backing up is a subject in itself, and if you don't know what it is, you need to learn. Wikipedia Backup Article.
Update Scratch LIVE
We're always adding new features, make sure you're on top of them, some may well help you with organizing your library.
Have Fun
If organizing your library becomes a chore, maybe you should have a mix and go back to it later. Don't forget why you're doing all this, to have more time for actual DJing!