Organizing Music! Music nerd heaven? Gigantic pain in the ass? Whatever your viewpoint, as a dj using Traktor, chances are your hard drive is awash with mp3s, and finding the one you want when mixing can be a challenge.
There are a thousand and one lengthy articles on organizing music, so if like me you tend towards distraction when overloaded with tech talk, you need a simple and effective way to keep track (sic) of your tracks. Here is what I do:
Organizing Music using ID3 tags
Clean these right up. I use mp3tag (freeware) to pare down the information to a minimum (Editors Note: a quick internet search will turn up other options out there for mac users) – remove everything apart from name, artist, genre, bitrate and date added. That includes deleting the album information (for reasons we will come to), and means you don’t get any random song titles or artists causing confusion.
Key is key
(Edit July 4th: Traktor has since built in it’s own key analysis software built right in to Traktor)
Mixed in key – genius! Download, open and drop your files onto the analyser. Be careful to follow the instructions on the forum to ensure your key info is written to the “comments” ID3 tag. This means you will be able to see it directly inside of iTunes and Traktor. Harmonic mixing is now a breeze, just browse inside Traktor using the comments field.
Import
I’m sticking with iTunes as my player because of its seamless integration of libraries and tracklists with Traktor. Once you have cleaned your tags and binned any tunes downloaded on a whim, import them into iTunes. You can now use iTunes on your laptop or mobile to work out mixes, save them to playlists and there they are right in Traktor.
Categorise your tunes
This has one simple function – when the floor is bouncing and you are trawling for the next tune, can you find it based on where you want the mix to go? I don’t mean the obvious stuff like bpm or genre – what about if you want to drop the energy or throw in something darker – how do you know which track to pick?
Add some information for each tune to the “comments” field that now has your key information. I use dark, edgy, neutral, funky, upbeat, driving, euphoric. Now iTunes and Traktor will list your tunes by key and mood. Don’t be tempted to create too many categories!
Use iTunes rating of 1-5 stars to reference the tracks “energy”, for example:
* set opener / soft / no beats.
** early set / light / beats.
*** mid set.
**** peaktime.
***** banger / set closer.
Selecting tracks using all this information put together means that from the song information displayed in Traktor, you know as much about the track as possible – key, mood, energy, genre, bpm – and the simple system means that categorising is not so much of a drag that you let it slide. You might argue that a good dj should know his tunes inside out and have all this stuff in his head. That’s true for tunes you know and love well, but with digital storage so cheap and downloads so easy, who can say that about their entire collection these days? Not me anyway!
For those of us on Android
It’s a massive pain that there is no music player on the platform that will mimic the search capability of iTunes. If you listen to music and work out mixes on the go (thank you, weekday commute) then you need to be able to use your information.
I copy the comments field above to the album field. This is why I delete the original entries at the start, I don’t care what album a track has come from when I’m thinking about mixes, I care what key and mood it has. So now my Android player has a big album of 7A key tunes of every mood, energy, bpm and genre. You can do a lot worse than just grabbing that and mixing it…
Sets
Digital music files make it easier than ever to work out mixes before playing them. But don’t fall into the trap of making your mixes completely preconceived and rigidly guided by adjacent key, similar bpm etc, thats not the point at all. A much better dj than me once told me never to work more than 2-3 songs ahead. Play a couple, read the crowd, play a couple, read the crowd. Is it working? Do you need to change tempo? Genre?
I use the categorisation information to work out mixes of 2-4 songs that fit really well together, then create a playlist with the information you need to know in a hurry. For example, a playlist in my library called “AHS.01.mid.10A.128” tells me that it’s a few tunes of acid house of mid energy and the first track is in key 10A and 128bpm. Mix them up and then see where you want to go next!
Final note
All the above works for me but there are a hundred ways you could vary it to suit your style. Categorising like this lets me concentrate on mixing the tunes and reading the crowd, and my mixing is better for it. I believe we should embrace new technology wholeheartedly, and these are exciting times for dj’ing, but keep perspective folks – technology has changed but the role of the dj hasn’t.
You might also like: How to Organize your music using multiple iTunes Libraries.
Author: Tight Point (facebook / twitter)
photo credit: Gary Simmons
Traktor Tips 
I downloaded a friends USB on to my traktor software, it had 2500+ sounds on it and at first I was delighted but I soon realised that 1800+ were misc files such as 5 second loops that he was using for producing and also loads of recordings that were useless to me. I already had about 800 useless files due to tracks on my itunes not working apparentely due to ‘missing file/drm protection/copyright issues’ wich did not make any sense as they would play perfectly in my itunes. That brought the total of unwanted files on my traktor to about 2600 out of 4000 This is very frustrating as it’s very hard to scroll trough, create playlists and so on. Could someone please help me out! Can you delete multiple files with no bpm detection? Can you delete files in any quick way?! If anyone could help my situation I would be forever great full as I feel this is holding me back as a young DJ. Thanks.
Yes, you can select multiple files and delete them from the collection – this video shows you how you select multiple tracks https://traktortips.com/re-organizing-tracks-in-traktor-playlists/
God bless ya man
glad you got this sorted!
I have my main music folders on my Traktor lap-top hard-drive catagorised into styles ie ; Vocal, Bouncy, Funky, Deep, Hard etc. Anytime I get a new tune, I’ll put them into any one folder.
I have made playlists on Traktor which tier those styles into rating and genre ie ; Bouncy techno (generic) , Bouncy house (generic), Bouncy Essentials (best of Bouncy tunes) and All Star Tunes (best of box)
This means that any one tune can be in 3 playlists (if it’s good enough!) If I am playing out, I can rely on my All Star tunes, and essential boxes for quality and familiarity. If I want to experiment, I just go deeper into the more generic playlists.
When I play I can rely on mood and vibe to direct me to the playlist I need to get the right tunes as I need them rather than rely on pre-determined tracklists.
This is very similar to my method of organising. But why do you write the key in the comments field, when there is a dedicated key field?
So if the above mentioned editors are used, the info we add will show up in the comments section of iTunes & traktor?
Thats how it looks yes – Have you tried it out?
Happy to have helped!
Also a nice mp3 tag finder is MusicBrainz and an alternative to iTunes which also has mp3tagging is MediaMonkey. Thanks again for the article!
Awesome! Thanks for sharing Numbdrum – glad you enjoyed the article! Thanks for stopping by!
Genius! I’ve been trying to decide how to organize my tunes for the past couple months and thanks to this article I can cross it off my list! Thank you Status Six and thank you Traktor Tips! Now I can focus on skillset.
Check out Trainspotter
http://www.tspotter.net
awesome tagging, synchronizing, organizing software
to help with complete itunes -> tractor integration.
including supporting many of the features that either itunes doesn’t
read from Traktor or vice/versa. The same goes with information
that gets updated as well.
A great free(i think) program to tag your MP3s on PC is called “mp3tagtools”. You can bulk label all your mp3s very easily based on the file format, and this can be done across multiple folders and sub folders which is great when doing your library of 20,000 plus songs!
Thanks for sharing Paul.
Thanks for reading Dan. Its in “For those of us on android”:
I copy the comments field above to the album field. This is why I delete the original entries at the start, I don’t care what album a track has come from when I’m thinking about mixes, I care what key and mood it has.
You say
“…That includes deleting the album information (for reasons we will come to)…”
but you never actually come to it… What’s your reason for deleting the album info?
Nic, yes it shows that, once the tracks have been analyzed by Traktor. It will do that on loading the track, or preferably set Traktor to analyze all new tracks when opening (in preferences).
Does traktor show the bpm reading in your playlist, when you browse thru the itunes library?
You can actually run mp3tag under OS X with an emulator: http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=11164
Alternatively, this perhaps?http://vortexbox.org/threads/3251-Mac-OS-X-version-of-mp3tag
Could you review and post an entry of the best mp3 tagging sw alternatives for Mac users?
Thanks!
Hey Dan – Check this out – http://www.digitaldjtips.com/2013/06/first-look-metabliss-id3-tag-editor-for-mac/