Fascinating thread, not least the original Avalon Emerson interview. I’ve hesitated to unveil my “system” as, for someone currently without gigs or a radio show, it’s clearly the work of a madman. With that caveat, here goes.
It starts in iTunes / Apple Music where all my digital music is organised – it physically resides on a SanDisk 1TB SSD drive, backed up all over the place, obviously. So each incoming track is assessed as to whether it is suitable for (hypothetical) DJing use - if so I flag this in the "Grouping” field, and have a smart playlist that just shows these – used later on in Rekordbox.
Regardless of whether it’s made the DJ cut, I tidy up the metadata, e.g. assign the genre, add artwork if necessary and find/check the year (not always possible - e.g. obscure steel-pan disco bangers). If the track is an edit and the original artist/title hasn’t been credited, I try to find the source (usually possible these days) and update artist/title.
Then it’s over to Rekordbox…
To import new tracks I open iTunes within Rekordbox, then open up the smart playlist containing only the DJ tracks, then import to Collection
Now that everything is in Rekordbox I give every track a colour, which is essentially an “energy rating” - from Balearic to Banger, and all points in between. I reserve Blue for tracks that I’ve changed my mind about and these get removed from the collection at some point. Unless I’ve changed my mind again.
Then I look at the waveform and sprinkle in a few memory cues at significant points in the track - if only to highlight the basic structure. These I’ve also been colour coding. This stage can also highlight if the track needs a bit of remastering, or even if it’s a potential edit project (if I could ever find the time). When this process is complete, I turn the analysis lock on, just to show its been done.
None of that is much of an overhead for new tracks but it’s been pretty time consuming to work through the backlog. As I’m only a relatively recent convert to Rekordbox, and with c, 3,700 tracks currently in there, just adding each track colour was quite a task. Adding the cues - which is essentially just a critical play-through of the track - is even more of a challenge, timewise. But given these are all tracks which by definition I think are pretty great, I’m basically listening to my digital collection, albeit in a complicated way.
Two things have really helped with this. Firstly the keyboard shortcuts in the Rekordbox desktop app mean I can fly through a track checking/adding cue points at 8 bar (or any other) intervals, if that’s the way its structured. Secondly the smartphone app means I can chip away at the backlog on my way to work and snyc it to the main database later.
I’ve played about with My Tags and have a few useful ones, but feared this could easily take me down an organisational rabbit hole, from which I might never emerge. Like pretty-much everyone else, I can then build smart playlists using the above metadata, as well as hand-crafted “crates” etc.
One recent development, which makes all of this slightly less mad, is that I’ve bought a Pioneer XDJ RX3 all-in-one-unit - basically two scaled-down CDJ 3000’s, a 2 channel NXS2 mixer, and a large central screen. So I can now stick all of the above onto a USB and actually play around on a reasonably real-world setup, while honing my strategy for getting back “out there”. Obviously everything I do on the XDJ then syncs back to the Recordbox via the USB stick.
The XDJ unit is great, btw, and I speak as a former audiophile/boutique/rotary zealot…
