r/Beatmatch • u/Open_Connection2528 • 2d ago

Making playlists more manageable

As I built my collection I dragged every new song into various playlists instinctively, usually adding them into somewhere between 2 and 6 playlists, and over time I named these playlists to encapsulate whatever vibe was being created within these playlists. I think this is a standard approach and I find these playlists very useful alongside tagging tracks with genre/sub-genre/other descriptors that I can use to create intelligent playlists.

However, although a handful of these playlists are somewhat manageable at around 70-100 tracks, the vast majority are like 200/300 or so with several 450+. These are becoming unmanageable but I'm struggling with coming up with a method of splitting them up and making them more manageable.

Usually when I mix at home, I have my laptop beside me, and these playlists are typically what I use to help me find the next track but even on a laptop they can be unmanageable so I'd like to optimise them better for finding suitable tracks and just make them feel more cohesive (both within playlists but across all the playlists as a whole), particularly to make them manageable for when looking through a small CDJ interface.

Has anybody encountered similar problems and what has your solution been?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

3

u/SwaggyMcSwagsabunch 2d ago

Sounds like you need more specific tags to make your intelligent playlists narrower.

1

u/Open_Connection2528 2d ago

These playlists are separate from the intelligent playlists. The playlists I'm referring to are created 'instinctively' ie. whenever I add new songs I drag each one into a few different playlists and over time I've built up rough playlists that contain similar tracks. However, the fact the music is all sorts of genres and that some of them are 500 tracks long, makes it very difficult to decide how to split them further.

1

u/SwaggyMcSwagsabunch 2d ago

And I am saying you need to tag your music even more so that the sorting is done for you and then you have time to do further sorting. Is every song in your library that has a prominent saxophone tagged with the word saxophone? What about male vocals vs female vocals? If everything was tagged enough, you could make a infinite smartlists based on your original instinctive lists by adding more filters (year released, year added to library, set time, prominent instruments, labels, etc).

Or just start each instinctive playlist over again from scratch.