3 Mistakes Beginner DJs Make With Digital Music - DJ Tips & Tricks

Moving from physical music to digital files makes it more convenient for DJs to carry thousands of song, but it also makes it easy to lose track of all that great music. Plus, some new digital DJs may also not be aware of the importance and advantages of preparing tracks well in advance before heading to a gig.

In this lesson we'll check out three common music mistakes beginners make and what you can do about them.

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[dakalothivhafuni]

This is great advice. It will be helpful in my dj career

[househeadspeakz]

You are right! I made that mistake by going to a gig and not having my playlist analyze. I had to use another DJs flash drive and was not familiar with his organization. I had to wing it, but it was a harsh lesson. I analyze and cue point all my tracks on the playlist. I also carry extra flash drives as backup. I even practice the set, so I know if the tracks fit with my line-up position. That is important because if you are opening for an event, your selection must be different from if you are mid DJ or Headliner.

[ClectaSkiMusic]

Great stuff, to you young DJs take the time & put in the work to organize the music....

[AWalYT]

Managing large libraries can be a pain, with the 40K+ I've collected and discovered over the years, I've found the best solution is to find something that's both efficient and organized.



Some tidbits from your's truly for the VirtualDJ fans out there with messy libraries:

Find your music folder in the browser, then right click it and set as favorite. This will be your handy access, and can be used in a pinch.

When you end up moving files you played on the fly to their place in your music folder where they belong, you can right-click that favorite folder and select batch -> add to search db. By default if VDJ comes across a file it has picked up before it will link what it knows to the new file, so you should be good to go just searching for the track after a sort.

To back this up it might be a good idea to set up a filter folder (filter icon on left of browser) as "top 100 firstseen"
This will show you the most recent added 100 songs, so you can pick out what might have been missed or fresh files that might not have been analyzed yet.

[househeadspeakz]

There is another way to organize your music. The way I did mine is to create a folder by genre have it in my external drive. Once a download my new music, I play it and save it in the folder. In Rekordbox, I move the tracks from my folders in the computer to Collections. After they are analyzed, I place on my playlist by genre. They allow me to keep my music in both systems organize. When I am ready to create a playlist for a set, I pull music for my various genre and arrange them. It makes it easy to store them on my flash drive and choose my tracks for gigs w/o the necessary search.

[iconix]

Great content. I also viewed one of your previous vids on your P-Dot channel, and you also advised to use iTunes as a source of storing your music. Do you still advise this....??

[jeffersonwalters]

Great vid best vase scenario is obe music folder with sub genre folders tip for me i like to use root directory to avoid longer folder substrings with maybe temp folder for pre organizing

[bboymac]

Yea just use bpmsupreme and organize your files by genre and type and like bangers and chill type ect;

[tharukkus]

My lappy has both a 1TB and 128GB Solid Stae drives. I keep all my music on the SSD and have it all backed up on a 1TB external (Solid State) drive. Thinking about duping the files onto the 1TB as well.

[hotfutureyearscome]

YEP . Very important to work on your file management

[hhaarmann]

Press relocate files and boom their there. Takes just a few seconds when your working with an ssd.

[DJDRFUNKJUICE]

You know it's funny I been doin that right at this moment for my Virtual DJ lucky they got my library for there software I can see what's in the data of not in the data it took me 3 to 4 days but I'm glad I got it done and now the fun begins it's all about tag the name of title and artists u name it so I'm glad I got to chance to watch it I was like I'm alright head of it 😂 lol

[dpgist]

Will moving music files from itunes to serato cause any disruption in the music files. Currently I let serato read my itunes library but I've heard some DJ's say that we shouldn't rely soley on Itunes

[TeleporterM]

And whatever you do guys never use the default folders Apple or Windows wants you to use for music. Create your own folders and put them on hard drives that don’t have the default Os operating system on it. And back up you music on external hard drives or home servers.

[itsamedjmario]

Ok. I need some desperate help... I have a ton of folders on my desktop, from different gigs, I would like to move all of them into my music folder(MAC), , but I don’t want to lose all the files in SERATO.. IS there a way to do this, or should I just move everything and re-analyze again.. I wish I would have been more careful and organized. I used to make a new folder for all my wedding gigs, just so it was easier to find that folder... but now my desktop is a mess.

Any advice on how to clean this up will be greatly appreciated.

Also, do u have different folders for genres in your music folder, or just the song, no matter new/old/ and genre. It’s just one huge list of songs. ??

Thanks P 👍

[nickash]

The best would be to select of your important songs and playlist for sets and keep it compact. The scan and analyse process takes too long in a hurry when you just modified its contents. Can't escape the fact that some influential people will insist you put a song or few into one of your sets that evening, so they hand you a USB stick, ok yuks, please have AV protection with you. Best they give a link to their dropbox or cloud storage. Importing songs on the fly is stressful. Don't ever let the DJ software find your loop and one shot libraries you use for productions. Lol. That was a nightmare experience.

[XEinstein]

I would hardly call that organization. Each music file in my library is saved in folders like ...\Genre\Key\Artist\Release No.\TrackName.flac and has its album art .jpg in the same folder.