categorizing tracks......

ianuss

just wondering how people out there categorize their music. You know........by year/genre/BPM etc.??

I'm a laptop dj myself so the vast majority of my stuff is mp3's and I can't quite decide. I had started to file tracks according to BPM but then I realised that I have tracks in folders, which although they have the same BPM, I wouldn't really play them together. Maybe duplicating tracks and putting them in muliple folders would be an option.

Just putting it out there I suppose........

Zascar

I mainly just have 5 or 6 folders by genre, I think it tends to get too complicated if you are sorting them by year/month like some do. I don't like to get too specific about categorisation - I prefer to have a wider choice to quickly browse/scan and see what jumps out at me as what I should play next. Otherwise you have a tendency to stick too much to one certain genre or time period.

I have all the newest stuff in one folder and gradually I move it to different folders once I'm familiar with it.

I've never sorted by bpm - software does it for you but regardless it's still not much of a consideration. You'll generally know if a tune is going to work and if its in a simiar bpm range but it should be well down the line in factors contributing to whether to play it or not.

electrogrimey

I use Traktor, so I use the crates to organize my music. Generally I make a crate for every mix or gig I play, and together they basically end up categorizing my music into different moods or genres. It works for me anyway.

ianuss

I was reading this the other day and decided to give it a go...

http://www.djtechtools.com/2009/10/26/organize-your-music-by-track-type/

It seems like a pretty good way to categorize your music. Basically, you have 3 types of track. Type I being quite minimal, Type II being midrange and Type III being high energy tracks. It's explained better in the link......

So, what I ended up doing was setting up folders based on genres, and once I had that done, I went through the tracks once more and filed them according to 'Type'. Now, it was fairly time consuming but it's something I'll only have to do once, and I'm hoping it will make track selection that little bit easier.

I've also used your suggestion Zascar, and kept a seperate folder for new tunes. Once I get to know em a bit better then I can pop them in with the others. Just thought it was an idea worth sharing

Zascar

The DJ TechTools site is feckin fantastic, such great stuff on there, love that blog. I do use a very similar way of doing things to them, but its not going to work fro everyone. I do not play a very wide range of genre's but if you do, this is not going to work really.

I use the Playlist/Crate feature a lot now, as well as folders. For my gig last week I had not even thought about what i was going to play until that evening, I was kinda sh1tting it as I was totally unprepared, but I just threw a load of tracks I really like into a playlist and then rearranged them into a rough order of how they would best go together. Obviously you don't have to do this but it kinda makes it easier to be able to adjust your set depending on what the crowd are doing. Someone gave me the idea of organising tracks by time of night - ie warmup & peak hour etc which could be a good idea too

I've also made a few random playlists for things like ideas of mixes I want to record or particular types of sounding tunes etc, and I can just randomly throw tracks into it whenever. You can have the same track in multiple playlists without actually moving the location of the file which is handy.

I've also minimised the amount of folders I have too - as I find sometimes you are inclined to stick to one folder and not move out of it, or when you progress to another, not look back again.

hans aus dtschl

I usually get about a record bag's worth of records every 3 or so months. When I buy, one record goes in, one record out. So every 3 months a stack of maybe 100 records are "out". Thats how I categorise my records: by the 100 or so. I'll know when I used to play a track, so I just dig for the rough time-frame. Stuff older than a few years just gets sorted by genre.

Before gigs, (maybe the day before, maybe the night of) I go back through the collection and pick out 10 or 20 (depending of how unsure I am of the crowd) that I used to love playing.