I don’t use Rekordbox because I prefer the experience of just having folders with wavs/aiffs in them and not being able to find ‘everything’ when I want to. I just make a folder for each gig with new stuff in it and then I organise it into different folders like ‘early’ ‘mellow’ ‘wonky’ ‘pumping’ etc. ‘middle’ is usually the biggest folder but it can have also several different folders in it too. I enjoy this process of filing the music before I play as it’s defo a way of planning your set a bit which I never did with vinyl as I would always just freestyle stuff. Having said that I do tend to put things in genres on vinyl before I play these days if there’s enough record storage space behind the decks.
I’ve got 3-4 usbs which I use to play regularly with and it can create a kind of mental test while playing to have to remember where certain tracks are. Some aren’t id3d properly too - so I have to remember that it’s in the disco ish folder in the Jakarta folder for example. It all adds to the limitations and challenges which keeps things more simple and music focussed for me.
I don’t have a huge collection of digital music, 2000 files or something like that. So it’s mostly fairly easy to find what I want to play. And I have varied tastes, it’s not 2000 files of 123-126 BPM 90’s house. There’s a drum&bass folder, a black metal folder, a jazz folder etc. Techno is divided into two folders (called techno old and techno new), the former being 80’s and 90’s stuff, the latter everything after that.
House music is the only one giving me trouble. About 600 files total, divided between old house (80’s and 90’s), new house (2000 and onwards) and tech house (which is kinda arbitrary as it’s more like a non-deep house folder for modern sounding house, from tech house to stuff like Anjunadeep type of progressive house).
The new house folder is especially troublesome as it’s 400 files and a bit cumbersome to browse on a CDJ, especially if it’s an older model with a small screen. I really have to figure out a way to split it 3 or 4 different folders that make some sense to me. Any tips are appreciated!
Music i buy (100% Digital Dj here) gets stored in folders by the day i bought it
I keep a weekly playlist with tracks for my next mix (rather recently bought or older stuff i redisver)
I keep shuffling this playlist till i found a good structure for a mix to record
I have a folder of the playlist of all mixes i recorded
For the (rare) occasions i play out i create also a folder where i create playlists by genere and “energy level” e.g house-low, house-mid, house-high, disco-low… (here tracks can appear in multiple playlists)
Reading through some of this again for ideas. I’ve been buying loads more from Bandcamp so my files are now peppered with zipped and unzipped files which is confusing. What I have bought has been more for specific to meet requests from the two radio stations that I supply music to. Still only play music that I like, but not so much just for me. Have gone down the rabbit hole of Vaporwave etc so have to translate everything from Japanese and nothing sounds the same after you have immersed yourself in Vaporwave, it’s like an audio drug. Also I’m getting older and more forgetful.
Have made a start by separating out all the Bandcamp files and now I may group recent digital purchases by date and BPM so I know who I bought them for.
Just read your Mixmag article on getting rid of your 13K records @GrimsbyRiviera. It made me rethink my current strategy for getting rid of (the majority of) my record collection. Think I’m gonna be WAY more picky about what I’m recording before letting go. My current strategy means I’ll be at this project for years to come, time I could spend on things I enjoy a lot more than ripping records. And after all, what’s the point of having a bunch of digital files of records I know I most likely will never listen to again?
Sorry only just saw this! I had it in my mind from about five years before I took the plunge that I would sell it all at some stage, so I started ripping a lot. But you’re right I’d often rip things that in hindsight were a waste of time and I’ve also bought (again) two or three of the records that I sold because I couldn’t live without a particular track (two records) and another where I discovered a really good mix I’d never previously listened to. I honestly do not miss collecting vinyl at all, other than rummaging a car boots or chazzers.
This is a fascinating thread. Especially as someone who only went digital at the start of the year.
Ill preface by saying that when I was soley playing vinyl, I was very much in the camp of doing very little (almost zero) planning or preparation before a set. I used to tell myself that this was 'real" DJing, but looking back now, I was often under-prepared and I probably done myself a disservice at times with my cavalier attitude to this.
As a new convert, I’ve amassed a collection of 400ish tracks so far, so maybe I’ll need to rethink my categorisation system as my collection grows. My current system is pretty simple and I try to spend as little time on my laptop as possible because it brings me no joy to sit tinkering on Rekordbox. I basically have 4 playlists, bar and club which are pretty self explanatory. Some tracks are in both of these folders if they’ll work in both environments.
I then have a folder called New. This is for new (to me) tracks as well as tracks I’ve just somehow never got around to playing out yet for whatevet reason. These 3 Playlists are all I used until very recently.
For my last 2 gigs though, Ive started making a specific playlist for the gig. Ive been adding around 2.5 times the amount of music that I’ll actually need for the gig. Ive actually really enjoyed having that limitation, which is what I’ve always been used to with a box of vinyl.
That’s not to say I stick 100% rigidly to the playlist for that specific gig. I do find myself jumping out and looking for something in my other playlists throughout the night, but not too often.
I’m sure this will all evolve as I become more entrenched in digital DJing, and Ive already picked up a few ideas from this thread.
Bro… make a playlist with the music that you like the most and separate it by musical genre or moments of the party or moments of the night in a bar. This will give you a better overview of what you want to play and also what you have in your library.
Basically I “organise” my digital collection like I do my vinyl. No RekordBox for me. In other words, it’s a complete chaos at times. For gigs I’ll often make folders where I throw in whatever I’m enjoying at the moment. I’ll also have folders containing subcollections, loosely based on genre. But as I tend to visit several styles in the course of a set, I’m not very pedantic as such.
Dan Idjut once said when I asked what he’d be playing in his set that night - “errr… you know… acid house?”
