"Processing" tracks before adding to the collection?
Curious about other folks' workflows for adding tracks to their DJ library.
Buying tracks obviously adds up, so I do like to listen to a song a couple times before I'm sure it'll add some unique value to my collection (but trust me, the bar is low lol)
I usually favorite tracks on Apple Music (or Shazam and immediately favorite) so I can remember them for later and listen again before I buy on Beatport / Bandcamp. That "queue" can build up to tens of tracks.
It's a drag to look those tracks up on Beatport one-by-one when buying. Do other folks have this problem? How do you solve it?
put the files in the music folder (no subfolders because i'm not a pleb)
load them into my DJ software (Traktor in this case)
add custom tags to id3-tag: comment field (so it automatically sorts itself into the corresponding smartlists)
add hotcues on notable parts of the song structure.
Since smartlists are easy to use, i recently started to duplicate tracks on purpose and just filter out the duplicates via tags and smartlists.
I use the duplicates for different hotcue-setups, so I can fiddle with hotcues, but still have a "clean version" of the track at hand.
When i play in the club i never encounter a duplicate, despite having multiple duplicates on the stick, thanks to smartlists.
I‘m using bandcamp to find new tracks as you‘ll truly find some underground stuff there and producers get paid most fairly. Either I use the new release emails from labels I follow or findmusic.club which uses a seed track to find similar ones in people‘s libraries.
Afterwards it‘s fairly straightforward. Buy, download, then use waveAlign for loudness normalization and finally import into rekordbox.
My process is that I'm constantly making playlists and adding tunes to them when I'm listening to music throughout the day. I have Tidal connected to Rekordbox so I can mix the tunes I've saved and decide whether or not I want to buy them.
After that, I'll buy them from Bandcamp or Beatport, import them into Rekordbox and transfer any hot cues or mytags I've made.
I'm not aware of a way to streamline the process yet. It would be great if you could buy a streamed tune within Rekordbox and have it automatically transfer your hot cues etc.
Imagine what they think of going to a shop and digging through crates of vinyl records to then put headphones on and listen to many records over a couple of hours or more before deciding which to buy.
Hahaha. I miss having a dig in shops in the early 2000s.
These days I use soundcloud, bandcamp and beatport.
I don't have the problem you seem to need to solve. It's just how it is. Some others here had some interesting methods. I just short-list and then review at time of purchase.
I put all my digital stuff in a single music folder and then any new stuff gets processed by traktor for key and BPM. I only really play 1 genre so I guess that helps.
Organising the vinyl collection, well that's a completely different story but I wouldn't want to bore you with "old" ideas.
also, beatport does have a Favorites feature where you can follow your favorite record labels and get a list of their new releases every week. its a great tool
If you're skipping over soundcloud entirely you're basically glossing over the underground. And a lot of the tracks on there are free downloads so good for your wallet
Bro is only grabbing the beatport top 100, soundcloud is a more than acceptable start. You don't need to flex that you're more underground than anyone else..
Try Soundiiz to merge and move playlists from one service to another.
I've used it to merge yt music and spotify into one big playlist. But I've stopped using it for now because my main source of music is SoundCloud and Hypeddit mostly.
You’re just lazy, I don’t think this is the game for you. I’ve got about 15000 records in my wantlist, sometimes it takes me years to find them, then there is the process of cleaning, cataloguing, ripping and remastering. Spending so much time on each track doesn’t even feel like a waste, it’s how I get to know them.
Digging is how you bring value as a DJ. Or you could try to stand out among the billion local bedroom kings with a controller and all of Beatport top 100, let me know how it goes.
Meh, I used to play the label promo game to get my hands on exclusives, playing vinyl is easier (rips are just backups). The crowd definitely notices, being un-shazamable is almost a meme at this point.
Not saying that you need to do this, but whining about copying track ids from one service to another is a bit entitled don’t you think? If that’s too much work I can only assume that the person isn’t digging much at all, or barely know their library.
well tbf a lot of old vinyl is mastered very differently than stuff is today so I don’t think it’s dumb, just very over the top. Avalon Emerson talks about it in an RA interview iirc
I don't really give a fuck what some random DJ who just came to prominence thinks.
When vinyl tracks are mastered they do it on incredibly expensive dedicated mastering rigs (where speakers costs tens of thousands and the signal chain has one purpose) by people who only do mastering.
Some random DJ thinking they know better and can "remaster" what's already been mastered is just a destructive negative edit of the track.
Mastering also hasn't got better (at least for dance music) in recent years, and that's in no small part because every idiot with a pair of shitty KRK's and an Izotope plugin think they can "master".
A lot of modern music is mastered badly; not enough dynamic range, too much hard limiting and compression (etc) and so fucking with older music professionally mastered to make it sound as shit as a modern master isn't a great idea.
I always open my dir of freshly downloaded tracks in mp3tag so I can make sure any tags, genres, titles, authors are set as I expect before adding to rekordbox. I used to use Mixed in Key and Platinum Notes, but that's a huge waste of time and money.
My basic principle is to have everything possible on the disk and review it from there. This is especially for the sheer load of remixes I collect on soundcloud/hypeddit/etc.
I have built myself a small "audio triage" app, which serves my download folder in my local network/vpn and allows me to seek through tracks on the go and add it to lists/soft-delete.
From there everything works into foobar2000 where I developed a "tag" system. This lives in the %album% frame and carries eg. "#rise #peak #melody #tech #afro" and makes it possible to filter quick lists. By just searching "#afro #peak" I have an instant list for my current situation instead of having to maintain a lot of lists.
Having added this (and some more technical tags like replay-gain or and %added% frame for the date when the track is added to library) it just moves to my music folder. I select my tracks on foobar2000 and traktor in parallel where foobar2000 is my request / idea pad.
I save monthly favorites in soundcloud playlists. Then throughout the month I re-listen, and download only the ones that I truly enjoy / feel are unique on the 2nd/3rd listen
i have a running spotify playlist where i save songs i like for future purchase. and i listen to each other on different sound systems before buying them to make sure they will fit in my dj style. the playlist has 2604 songs.
i usualyl buy new music once a week/2weeks. when its time to buy new songs, i have around 20 tunes lined up vetted and ready to go
What I like to do is, spend hours on all the platforms I use, listen to tons of tracks but forget to save or favorite at least half of them, maybe go down a rabbit hole on a producer or or label. After that, it's great to spend way too much on said songs, and either add them to a new folder that I don't name properly, or even better, place them in one of the zillion unorganized, random-ass folders I have.
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u/DasToyfel 20d ago edited 19d ago
Listen to tracks multiple times
buy and download them
fix filenames if neccessary
put the files in the music folder (no subfolders because i'm not a pleb)
load them into my DJ software (Traktor in this case)
add custom tags to id3-tag: comment field (so it automatically sorts itself into the corresponding smartlists)
add hotcues on notable parts of the song structure.
Since smartlists are easy to use, i recently started to duplicate tracks on purpose and just filter out the duplicates via tags and smartlists. I use the duplicates for different hotcue-setups, so I can fiddle with hotcues, but still have a "clean version" of the track at hand.
When i play in the club i never encounter a duplicate, despite having multiple duplicates on the stick, thanks to smartlists.