The latest iteration of Beatport Pro hasn’t been receiving too much love from me until recently. Moving from one organizing method to another is a huge leap and involves commitment, something I haven’t been willing to do for a while now. But I recently decided to take a deeper look at Beatport Pro for the reasons of tidying up my music library.

Keeping your Music Organized

There are many ways in which digital DJ’s can organize their music libraries and many different tools that can be used to achieve a searchable and well organized collection of music. As humans are creatures of habit, it can be hard to cause them to change their ways and introduce something new, especially when it involves a lot of work.

The thing is, you don’t need to change your existing methods to make use of Beatport Pro’s features. At least not the way I use Traktor anyway.

I mainly use my own file structure on my hard drive, with a folder designated for each new batch of music. I then use Traktor to do the organizing. What I have noticed though is that many tracks are missing genres or artists and various other snippets of information. This is due to laziness on my part by not fully labelling things as I import them. But not to worry, the saviour is here, and it takes the form of Beatport Pro.

How does Beatport Pro Help?

First of all you don’t have to fully commit to Beatport Pro for it to be of some use to you. You can use it it to fill in the missing gaps, such as genre, artist, mood, energy and even add cover art.

When you import Music into Beatport, it doesn’t copy the music, it simply points to it, in it’s existing location. You can then export the library as an iTunes recognized xml file. The file can then be read via the iTunes integration inside of Traktor.

So here’s my method in bullet form so you can see it laid out simply. I would also recommend watching the video below through fully so you can see some of the quirks that are presented by this integration.

• In Traktor – locate the tracks that are missing various data
• In Betaport Pro – Create a platlists in which to place the tracks you found above.
• Drag the tracks from Traktor to the newly created Beatport Pro Playlist.
• In Beatport Pro – Select small batches of tracks and ‘Sync with Beatport’.
• Match up your tracks to those in Beatport, checking the correct tracks off as you go.
• Work through all tracks adding mood and energy.
• Create a second playlist in Beatport Pro to place your fully tagged tracks – I called mine ‘tagged’.
• Move the completed tracks to the new playlist, making sure you delete them from the first playlist.
• Close down Beatport Pro
• In Traktor – Make sure your iTunes File Management location is set to the beatport xml.
• Refresh the iTunes connection.
• Import the ‘tagged’ music playlist as a playlist into Traktor.

NOTE: I have an issue with moving key across from Beatport to Traktor, even if the key is written in the tracks in Beatport, it doesn’t import across to Traktor. This means that if I ever re-import the same tracks again it will over write the analysed key in Traktor with ‘none’. This means that any tracks you do this to, will lose their key information.

This glitch means that I need to do two things:

• After importing tracks from Beatport Pro to Traktor, I must re-analyse for key.
• I must also go back into Beatport Pro to delete the tracks that I have sorted and tagged, so that I don’t erase my key tags again on iTunes refresh.

Once you have finished tagging and importing, you can change your iTunes library back to your original one should you prefer. Check out the video below for a full demonstration of this process, be sure to understand your workflow and always test the entire process with a couple of tracks first before doing your entire library. You want to make sure it works the same for you.