How To Orgenize Your Music Traktor Pro 2
05.08.2020by admin
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How do you organize you music library in Traktor? If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. Your issue you face is a common one with digital DJing. I concur with a lot of the above. Most DJ without evening know it have become music hoarders. There is a huge difference between a hoarder and connoisseur. Reduce your library, amount of remixes and amount of playlist. Alternatively, your Traktor software can redirect to this page through a pop up that appears on the bottom right hand side. How do I connect my SoundCloud account to Traktor DJ 2? From your instance of Traktor, click the SoundCloud icon in the left column of the library.
Reader Tony Corless writes: “I moved on to Traktor Pro and Kontrol X1 a few months back. I like it but I find organizing my music a pain. I don’t use iTunes but have my music separated into folders of old skool / rnb / party / rock / dance etc. The main box of recent stuff has about 600 tunes in now and it’s hard to manage – even some of the playlists with about 60 tunes can be a pain. I used CDs for ages and used to burn best of CDs and it was easy just to go straight to the CD that I wanted. I don’t like having to scroll through loads of stuff to find what I want and I don’t want to spend loads of time starring at a screen or typing on a keyboard.”
“Any advice you can give me to make things more user friendly would be appreciated.”
Digital DJ Tips says:
There are going to be lots of answers to this and it will be good to see what everyone else thinks, but for me the key is going to be duplicating your “best of” CDs (or something close) in Traktor. The simplest way would be to set up a number of Traktor playlists called “Best of RnB” etc and simply prepare beforehand by dragging 15 or so best-of tunes to each folder. Then you have the equivalent of your best of CDs ready and waiting for you. Traktor is not the best place to be organising your tunes though, and because it happily reads playlists and smart playlists from iTunes, it means you can more easily do the sorting there, with many advantages.
As iTunes supports smart playlists, you could set up special “best of” playlists that automatically include any tune you’ve tagged “best of” from that particular genre. You can tell the smart folder to only show you the most recent 15 tunes, so you automatically have a “best of” CD in a playlist that consists of your 15 latest favourites, but if you wanted to see them all, or a year’s worth, or whatever (say, on New Year’s Eve), you could quickly do so by changing the rule on the smart folder.
Alternatively, you could just tell the folder to show you everything and remove the “best of” tag when you tired of a tune and had a new one to replace it.
If you think of what you do in iTunes as the equivalent of burning your best of CDs (or packing your record crates), and what you do in Traktor as the equivalent of flicking through these CDs, you’ve then got your metaphor for your old way of working, and you won’t find yourself with your nose stuck in Traktor’s files and folders while DJing.
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I suspect that once you get into smart playlists in iTunes as well as its other music library benefits, you’ll wonder why they’re not in Traktor, and won’t be able to live without them.
What would your advice to Tony be? Would you use iTunes or do you have a method for sorting your tunes in Traktor that saves scrolling and searching? Please join in by adding your answers in the comments below.
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Keeping your music files organized is actually the most difficult part of digital DJ’ing. Yet I feel it is the most crucial aspect to making sure that you flow as a DJ.
Knowing how your music is organized and where you can find it with ease, will make your job as a DJ much more joyful. The worst feeling whilst playing a set, is having only a few bars of a track left before you’ve even got something loaded up into the next deck.
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Over the last five years I’ve been toying around with file structures, file types, playlists and different software, searching for the ultimate way to organize my music collection. The key with anything in life is to be flexible. So whilst I’m going to share my method with you here, it’s down to you to understand if it works for you or not. If it doesn’t, don’t use it. If it does, then that’s great and I hope it benefits you going forward.
File Type
First things first, the file type. Debates rage on, but get what works for you. I’ve tried many file types and my collection has consisted of ‘.wav’, ‘.aiff’ and ‘.mp3’. I have not tried the ‘.flac’ file type yet, despite there being a hard core set of fans.
Just use what feels right. and is compatible with your software.
I converted all my .wav’s to .aiff’s just recently. I wanted to keep the quality, yet introduce the ease of reading the meta tags and cover art. I was finding the .wav’s annoying for not displaying the full details in the track collection.
I have recently begun buying .mp3’s again for money reasons. I was finding that the .wav’s were not only taking up a lot of space, but the cost was adding up. I wasn’t buying as much music as I wanted and that needed to change.
File Structures
I like to be in charge of how my music is organized on my hard drive. I don’t like iTunes’ method for this.
If you use iTunes to manage your music then the file structure is set up inside of iTunes filing convention and looks something like:
- iTunes > Music Library > Artist > Album > Track
This is not my preference as I like to keep music organized based on when I buy them. For this reason I don’t use iTunes at all. (More on this later)
How To Organize Your Music Traktor Pro 2 Download
Music software programs have a habit of adding an import date, or ‘date added’ tag to tracks when you import them. If you start moving between software, then the import date changes around on you and can confuse you when trying to find tracks based on when you bought them. ‘Release date’ is an alternative method, but this isn’t always in the tags.
So this is how my file structure looks:
- External HD > Music > Music – YY/MM > Track
(The ‘Music’ Folder is set as the music folder inside of Traktor)
You’ll notice that my music sits on an external hard drive. This is so that the collection is always backed up. I occasionally copy the entire collection onto my desktop too, just incase the external gives up. It’s worth setting reminders on your calendar for backing up.
The folder naming convention works great for organizing music as you buy it. Anything I buy in March 2015 will get added to the folder called ‘music – 15/03’. This makes it easy to know what and where your latest tracks are.
Software
So once you’re happy with your music folder structure, it’s time to figure out what role your various music software programs are going to have in this process.
As I mentioned above, I do not use iTunes. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. Use what you like and what you enjoy and whatever works best for you.
I stay away from the iTunes integration as I find Traktor has enough options for filtering and organizing music, plus I don’t like to be reliant on third party integrations as there’s just too much possibility for things to go wrong.
If you’re using Traktor, and Traktor only, then you will find it way easier to trouble shoot your collection, adding iTunes integration seems to complicate thing a little. I like to keep it simple.
Playlists
Keeping it simple is the key to success here and using the naming convention of ‘music – YY/MM’ for my collection really helps with this.
Once I have added music to the new folder, let’s say ‘music – 15/03’, then I import my music folder to Traktor. (Side note: you have to use the zero in the single months, else the order will get mixed up when you get to months 10,11 and 12),
With the list sorted by import date in Traktor, I can easily see the tracks I have just imported at the top.
I have a playlist folder created in Traktor called, ‘Purchase History’. Now inside this folder I create a playlist called ‘music – 15/03’ and drag in the new tracks that I jet imported to the collection. I then highlight them all and analyse.
Now my ‘Purchase History’ playlist folder in Traktor, mirrors what I have on my hard drive. It feels clean doesn’t it?
Now so long as I am not using .wav files, I can filter the entire collection, or just that playlist for tracks based on genre, key, BPM, whatever I like. I can obviously create more and more playlists based on other factors as I go, but the main structural playlists are set, so if I am looking for my latest stuff, I can simply navigate to the latest folder in ‘Purchase History’ and I’m ready.
Using iTunes
If you are an iTunes fan and just can’t live without it, then there’s no reason that you can’t do the same thing in iTunes as I just described for Traktor.
You can create a playlist folder called ‘Purchase History’ and inside create playlists named as you have on your hard drive, ‘music – 15/03’ and drag your latest tracks into there.
The clincher here with iTunes is whether you have it set to import all music or not.
If you have iTunes set to import all music, then when you drag tracks into it from your hard drive it will be making a copy of that track and placing it in it’s file structure:
- iTunes > Music Library > Artist > Album > Track
So it could be that you’re making duplicates without knowing and killing your hard drive space.
I personally would use the file structure I set out above for your music on the hard drive:
- External HD > Music > Music – YY/MM > Track
Then make sure in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced
That the ‘Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to library’ check box, is UN-checked.
This way you won’t be making duplicates and you’ll be in charge of how your files are structured.
Rekordbox and Rekord Buddy
This additional step is only necessary if you use Pioneer equipment to DJ separately from Traktor, and for those that don’t then you can simply ignore this step.
For the last few months I have been using Rekordbox and Rekord Buddy.
Once I had fully organised my Traktor library, I synced the collection up to rekordbox using rekord buddy. It’s easy to do, you just need to carefuly follow the instructions included with rekordbuddy and obviously make back ups of your entire collections first.
I have found it very useful to keep the collections the same, but I am still new to it so will not go into too much detail at this stage. So far though I have been using it everyday ffor the past couple of weeks and it’s working great for me.
Wrap Up
I’ve found this is the best method for knowing where your music resides on your hard drive and keeping it as unified and clean as possible.
When using my laptop to play out, I now simply create playlists on my main desktop computer and export them using airdrop to my laptop where I import them into my mobile version of Traktor.
This way, I don’t have countless tracks to wade through on my laptop and more thought goes into the set I play.
Once I’m done I simply delete the tracks off my laptop knowing that they’re all still on my desktop. This keeps my laptop clean and promotes less chance of freezing or screwing up.
If you don’t have desktop as well as a laptop, that is totally cool. You can still use the same naming conventions as I outline above but you MUST make sure you back up to an external drive like someone with OCD.
If you don’t use time machine, then the main folders you need to back up are your Music Folder and your Root directory. Traktor’s manual tells you where you can find that.
How To Organize Your Music Traktor Pro 2 1
It doesn’t matter what software you use for DJ’ing so long as your tracks are organized and backed up.
Know your collection, know how to navigate it and know how your music sounds.
Enjoy….
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