How do you organize your CD wallet?

electrogrimey

Searched for threads on this, but there's not much.

For the DJs who use CDs, how do you have your wallet organized? I've just filled up my wallet, so am going to have to buy a bigger one, and plan on re-burning everything and organizing it, but I'm wondering what way to do it. At the moment before every gig I just burn a CD of the new 10/whatever tracks I've gotten since the last one, so it's all chronological.

I can organize everything beautifully, in genres and BPMs and whatever, but then how will I keep it organized once I start burning new stuff again?

Dividing it into genres/styles, and within that in BPM seems the best way to me, anyone have a better system?

Is mise le key

electrogrimey wrote: »

Searched for threads on this, but there's not much.

For the DJs who use CDs, how do you have your wallet organized? I've just filled up my wallet, so am going to have to buy a bigger one, and plan on re-burning everything and organizing it, but I'm wondering what way to do it. At the moment before every gig I just burn a CD of the new 10/whatever tracks I've gotten since the last one, so it's all chronological.

I can organize everything beautifully, in genres and BPMs and whatever, but then how will I keep it organized once I start burning new stuff again?

Dividing it into genres/styles, and within that in BPM seems the best way to me, anyone have a better system?

Ah i must sound like a broken record (pardon the pun) but you see thats part of the beauty of having Vinyl sleeves, flicking through em and quickly registering the label & knowing that must be a particular tune, even seeing the dge of the sleeve amongst many in your collection letting you instantly skip to it because its recognisable that way,

But if i was to answer your original question,

*note to self; stop fuc.king rambling*

I would definitley organise into genres, House, Techno, Hard Trance, etc. & then have them chronilogically within their own genres, would seem an easy way to locate a tune to me that way.

jtsuited

electrogrimey wrote: »

I just burn a CD of the new 10/whatever tracks I've gotten since the last one, so it's all chronological.
?

that is one sure way to not build a substantial and deep crate. You will end up just playing what you've recently got and it will quickly be forgotten as you get more.

dubsbhoy

I've four wallets, one with old school broken down into House - Pro/Tracne - US Garage and one with mixed stuff

Other wallets are divided up into years and then broken down into months

Vinyl is done by labels/genres

electrogrimey

jtsuited wrote: »

that is one sure way to not build a substantial and deep crate. You will end up just playing what you've recently got and it will quickly be forgotten as you get more.

Exactly, which is why I want to re-order them.

eeloe

Back when I was burning Cd's I only put one track per cd, and only kept about 200 in the case at any one time!

electrogrimey

eeloe wrote: »

Back when I was burning Cd's I only put one track per cd, and only kept about 200 in the case at any one time!

I've heard people do this alright, but I have 2 copies of each CD, so if one breaks I have a spare, so keeping 5/6 tracks on a CD seems much easier to me.

R.Shackleford

4 tracks per CD with genre and date writen on the top, then use 4 cd wallets to divide them up into Techno/minimal, tech house/House, Drum and bass, and ambient/deep house.

A few people have told me that if you only burn 1 track per CD the data is burned onto the centre of the CD and is less likely to get scratched from inserting and ejecting it from the cdjs. Dont know how true that is.

Executive Steve

Is mise le key wrote: »

Ah i must sound like a broken record (pardon the pun) but you see thats part of the beauty of having Vinyl sleeves, flicking through em and quickly registering the label & knowing that must be a particular tune, even seeing the dge of the sleeve amongst many in your collection letting you instantly skip to it because its recognisable that way,

Trying to do that in the dark with a heavy bag of records on the floor when you could just be flicking through a wallet of CD's at the same height as the mixer without having to bend down though...

Personally I organise my tunes by genre, sort of. A shelf for Dubstep and Garage, six shelves for DnB plus three crates of current DnB and a bag of current stuff. Bags for gigs and radio shows get packed with records packed mainly from the crates and the stuff that's lying within reach. Every six weeks or so everything gets reshuffled and I spend a weekend or two reevaluating older bits in the light of newer purchases so I'm not always playing the same tunes over and over.

Inside the bag tunes get arranged roughly by strength. Mellow and sprightly at one end and vicious evil **** down the other end, with a section at the back for DJ tools and teases etc.

Two or three clumps of maybe up to three or four tunes that work particularly well together in a sequence make up the middle section of the bag.

Is mise le key

Executive Steve wrote: »

Trying to do that in the dark with a heavy bag of records on the floor when you could just be flicking through a wallet of CD's at the same height as the mixer without having to bend down though...

Personally I organise my tunes by genre, sort of. A shelf for Dubstep and Garage, six shelves for DnB plus three crates of current DnB and a bag of current stuff. Bags for gigs and radio shows get packed with records packed mainly from the crates and the stuff that's lying within reach. Every six weeks or so everything gets reshuffled and I spend a weekend or two reevaluating older bits in the light of newer purchases so I'm not always playing the same tunes over and over.

Inside the bag tunes get arranged roughly by strength. Mellow and sprightly at one end and vicious evil **** down the other end, with a section at the back for DJ tools and teases etc.

Two or three clumps of maybe up to three or four tunes that work particularly well together in a sequence make up the middle section of the bag.

And does your stapler have to be on the left hand side to the phone on your desk & all pens have their lids replaced when finished??

Only buzzing, jesus you are organised, i would be bending down in the dark flicking through vinyl sleeves while you are enjoying a drink at the bar:D

Executive Steve

Is mise le key wrote: »

And does your stapler have to be on the left hand side to the phone on your desk & all pens have their lids replaced when finished??

Only buzzing, jesus you are organised, i would be bending down in the dark flicking through vinyl sleeves while you are enjoying a drink at the bar:D

You have to be organised though - especially with vinyl and the hassle of getting the tune off the deck, back in it's sleeve, finding the right tune to play next, fishing it out of your bag, getting it out of it's sleeve, putting it on and getting it cued up and matched and ready to go - digital DJ's can do all that with three mouse clicks, if you're doing a gig you don't want any of that to take more than 60 seconds of searching and faffing about.

I had a look inside Andy C's bag once, he carries about 60 records with him and has them all slotted into clumps with clearly labelled cardboard dividers to seperate them.

When I'm playing out I try to get through tunes as quickly as possible, mix the next one in before the second drop ideally, when I used to turn up for gigs with 80 records and nothing planned I spent more time scrabbling for the next record to play than I actually spent playing them, which is the exact opposite of what a good DJ should be doing.

electrogrimey

I think organization helps sets a huge amount. The sets I'm least proud of are ones I've turned up to without any planning, and my tunes in a mess.

jtsuited

Is mise le key wrote: »

And does your stapler have to be on the left hand side to the phone on your desk & all pens have their lids replaced when finished??

Only buzzing, jesus you are organised, i would be bending down in the dark flicking through vinyl sleeves while you are enjoying a drink at the bar:D

I only have about a hundred and fifty records (which I imagine is about 1/1000th of what Steve has), and I have to keep them organised pretty much exactly like Steve said (obviously I don't have 3 shelves of dnb).

Like with most people in music, I'm ridiculously unorganised in every area of life apart from music.

electrogrimey

Bought my new CD wallet, and realised I can take a screengrab of the iTunes playlist, resize it to 12 x 12 in preview, and it'll be the perfect size for the sleeve. Now I just have to decide on the best system to burn all my CDs in before I spend all day doing it.

Few different CDs of non-housey stuff, hip-hop, dubstep, ridiculous end of the nights songs, and then the house in a few different genres, and in BPM within them?