You’re heading out to a house party where your friend is taking his laptop to DJ off. You want to play too, but you don’t want the added responsibility of taking your own laptop as you don’t want to keep checking on and you just want to unwind and relax. What can you do?
No problem, all you need is a USB Stick large enough to hold the set that you intend to play. Once you have exported your set list to your USB stick, you can pop that in your pocket and you still have 2 free arms to carry your beers, or to throw around all those ladies that are going to be surrounding you once you’ve played your set!
Moving your tracks to USB
It’s a very simple process, which starts with you first making a playlist.
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- Right click in the browser tree and create playlist
- Drag and drop your selected tracks into the playlist
- Create a folder on your hard drive and give it a name
- Go back to the playlist in Traktor and right click it
- Select export, select NML as the export format
- Check the box that says copy tracks to destination
- navigate to the folder you just created
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You should now have the playlist saved to the folder on your hard drive. All you have to do now is drag that folder to the USB stick and hey presto you now have a copy of your set, complete with tracks and any cue-points you may already have on each of those tracks.
Once you turn up at the party, plug in your usb stick and within Traktor navigate to the USB stick – Now all you have to do is play a blinding set that impresses all your pals and away you go. You can get to work on those beers you brought with you and you can leave your friend to worry about the laptop and all the other DJ equipment. Hopefully now you are able to easily export music to USB Stick in Traktor.
Great for Back up too
This is also a great exercise to perform when DJ’ing in a club too. Even if you have your computer with you, it is just one extra back up for your set. If your computer crashes or something happens to it on the way to the gig, you at least have your set with you. Then you can either use someone elses computer to DJ off of, or to burn the tracks to CD and play a CDJ set. (Yes, you should learn how to use CDJ’s)
Let us know how hard you rocked after turning up with a USB stick to your latest house party. You can even instragram your great time and tag the picture with #Traktortips to appear on the Gallery. If you have any other tips to share let us know in the forum.
photo credit: WarzauWynn via photopin cc
Traktor Tips 
Another tip… Is that if you work with beatgrids & cuepoints. You can save these on the actual file(.mp3) as metadata.
Just set you hotcues and prep ur song and when ur done, just right click the track in Traktor and select “lock Async”. Now all cuepoints & beatgrid adjustments plus loops etc will be saved on the file. So If you pop the USB in another PC running traktor, it’s all analyzed cuepoint mapped and ready to play like you know it.
Just thought I share. This is great to keep in mind for backup. I’ve done it with my whole collection of 40000+ songs :). Not worried at all 😉
Thanks for adding that – yes. I cover the importance of locking your grids in another article. (You can use the little ‘locl’ symbol for a shortcut way to doing this too.) Thanks again.
No worries 🙂 great article by the way !
thanks
how do you maintain a playlist order? Traktor geniously appears to reorder the playlist?
I have not experienced the playlist order changing.
any idea why this does not copy ALL the tracks in the playlist to the destination? I have been doing this for years, trying to share all of the songs in a playlist with other DJs, and all of the songs NEVER transfer, only some of them. HELP!!!
There is a little check box that asks if you want to move the tracks too – make sure you check this!
Thank you for responding. Yes, the little box is checked every time and only a few tracks will export. it doesnt matter if the playlist has 500 songs or 10 songs they all wont transfer. My music is all on an external harddrive which is hooked up when i am transferring music.
I wonder if the fact that you are moving from one external to another external is causing some issues? Maybe try to export directly onto your internal hard drive and then drag those files onto the stick!
Hi Guys, thanks for all your tips and videos, can anyone post some detail info/tutorial on some creative ways of using the foot switch on the Kontrol S4? There”s not much out there on this at all.
Thanks, any help will be very much appreciated.
Thanks for the suggestion Bockarie! I will try and get something up for you in the near future. Really though it is simply intended to record the loops into the sampler.
thanks, I thought it could be use for other creative functions, cause I know there are many great DJs out there who can midi mapped almost anything.
Sorry that my question was not clear enough, I was trying to find out if anyone had come out or MIDI MAPPED the FOOT SWITCH on the KONTROL S4 to perform other functions
Hey, thanks so much for this post it was really helpful! saved me having to take my whole pc to a set tonight. NICE ONE!
Great stuff! Thanks for the comment!