How to Organize Your Music Library | Share the Knowledge

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[jimmiejam]

Never ever delete your music. Just take time to organize it. If you delete now you will hate yourself later. Hard drives are so cheap nowadays. You can buy a 64 gig 3.0 thumb drive for $20 now. You can hook your hard drive up to your cell phone and organize your music why your watching TV. We have too much technology at our hands to be lazy. Be creative while you can.✌😆🎧

[UONeal]

I honestly felt like you were talking to me. I recently got back into DJ'ing after battling addiction for almost 20 years. 3 years drug free and I'm using serato DVS. I'm downloading dirty, clean, instrumental, Acapella. I have about 700 songs. I feel my biggest problem is no I don't organize after a DL session where I'll DL 10 songs or so... Rinse and repeat... But thanks for the tips... Keep doing what you do

[duboi]

When I first started back a good friend gave me THOUSANDS of old school Breaks and I'm Still Sorting through them.

Pools I set a 20 track max & then immediately go through and run a set using those 20 tracks... setting cues, grids, and moving them to appropriate folders by year, genre and month added. (all sub folders) as I go

[akaTRAPxx]

How to organize tracks:

A. Create playlists by genre/category (I have one for warm ups, one for bangers, etc)
B. Create sub-playlists based on the name of the main playlist (for example, warm ups) and BPM range, so Warm Ups is the crate, and the sub crates are split based on BPM (Warm Ups 101 - 103)
C. Organize every single song within the sub crates in alphabetical order. I choose to do it by track title since I personally recognize song titles first before I do artists.


Doing this will not only keep medium to semi-large libraries organized, but it makes it MUCH easier to browse through big libraries on CDJs. Since I only keep songs I really like/see potential in, I can remember with pretty good accuracy what BPM range a song is in just by remembering the name. For example, I know "Look At Me Now" is around 73 BPM, so I'll just go to either my 71 - 73 BPM folder, or my 74 - 76 BPM folder and scroll straight to the Ls.


Obviously your mileage will vary depending on the size of your library, but I found this to be the most effective way to manage my library by far because it works well with both laptop-based and standalone DJ equipment.

[fkkkkkenig]

*looks at library*

50000+

This is gonna take a while

[alex]

Woaw, that video should been seen by every digital dj. Golden tips!

[Jedi_Jonson]

Love the fact that tlm is from Amsterdam but he sounds like he's from New York. Keep up the awesome advice my dude👌👌

[ZÆŁ-sg]

Omg this is so true! At first, I didn't have enough music but now i've downloaded so many songs that I can't keep track. Thank you @DJTLM! :)

[salvaavlas]

I love this guy because he is not stupid. Follower since TLM_tv and always good impressions. Work hard, play hard.

[MB-tsoq]

In the old days, because a couple songs you liked, you had to buy a vinyl or a CD with a bunch of music that aren't as good as the ones that made you decide to buy them in the first place.
I like the DJ Pools because you have access to a lot of good musics that are not from mainstream artists and I think this amazing, because I always enjoyed to play something different from somebody else. However, now I am facing this exactly same problem! I realized that I have more music that I can play. I was considering to do what TLM suggest, but I was not sure about that. However, when I watched this video, I agreed with him and I decided to select the best songs out of the almost untreated 2.000 musics that I have and delete the ones I will never use. All the way I used to do when I had to pay for a CD. And I will do this exact same way henceforward!

[loudandklearfm]

yeah dude you did make a lot of sense appreciate that,

[integrity]

Good stuff. As soon as I download tracks (which I’m super picky even at buffets LoL) I quickly sort them into crates or sub crates. But before that, I make sure I put in my hot cues (4bar intro, 8bar build, drop, outro, etc.) so that way if I haven’t used that track I at least did the prep work so when I do stumble upon it later it’s ready for use.

Of course I’m not perfect at it so there are times where I have to figure that out while spinning live (which is fun when it works just right lol).

But I find myself having problems with keeping up with current that I begin to forget the bangers of old.

Great topic. Allows me to know that all DJs can get in this rut of getting too much and not using much of it.

[druthedj]

WORD! I even paused all my record pool downloads as it was getting out of hand, hahaha. Focusing more on quality vs quantity, and only keeping tracks that I would actually play. I also recently started a clean Serato database just to get it lean and clean. Keep the tips coming!

[johnparker]

This is such good advice and yes I'm also guilty as charged. Recently deleted a load of tropical house from my drive. I don't even like tropical house. I think people need to realise that you need to leave 20% of your drive free to ensure your computer can run efficiently. Clear out the clutter

[hotfutureyearscome]

i am not a fully working DJ but i do listen to every track that BPM supreme has on a weekly basis. it takes about two hours. also i check the top 50 monthly list from DJ City. sometimes there is a song or two i did not download for whatever reason that is a hit now. I also check out the songs on sound cloud to see if there is something no one has and it is hot (to me) .

[anthonymarquino]

I like how you described digging back in the day before serato and traktor...

[michaelperez]

I try to keep my crates small now.. I'll organize top 50-100 songs per genre by the decades.. I'll update and swap songs by popularity and keep my files down to a minimum

[sirtalented]

I have a file for the "year" and a subfile called "hitters" where I put the best of them. If it has to be "warm up" I go to the hitters from previous years.

[ajw]

This is great advice. As someone transitioning to a new computer, effectively migrating the setup is definitely harder when you're not 100% sure what all is in your crates. 

BUT (and maybe this is some insecurity talking) it only takes a few times of someone requesting the hottest song and you not having it, for a DJ's crate digging habit to turn into casting a wider net versus quality digging...That mixed with a full time job or other obligations.. it's a balance. I think TLM is right on the money, and he says it himself, it just isn't that easy.

[IAMVDJROBAA]

Thats why i use XtendaMix. It helps me download stuff that i only need and find to be unique. Unique in a sense that i cannot find the same song in my other video pools. Good stuff.