FILE, DON'T PILE
Jul 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Ean Golden
For the past few years, you have been buying, ripping and recording like mad. Now you boast an impressive collection of digital music. At first glance, having all that music at your disposal sounds great. Then, after a few gigs, reality sets in; it's hard to find what you really want. With records, you were forced to pick out your top 100 and bring those to the gig. Now, many of us tend to think no preparation is needed because you have all your music with you. Wrong. Without preparation, good songs will remain buried in your collection, never to see the light of day. You will have a tendency to go to the songs and mixes with which you are most familiar, possibly resulting in predictable and repetitive sets. Wasn't that the problem we were going to get rid of with digital mixing in the first place? Don't worry; there is hope. With some creative planning and a lot of organization in your DJ library, you will be coming up with new creative mixes and combinations night after night.
PREPARE TO ROCK
Although creative preparation and practicing is crucial to success, what I'm talking about here is getting your music library organized so you can focus on DJing and not searching through thousands of songs. Many digital DJs use iTunes as the organizational front end to their programs, and some don't. Because of its universal application and simplicity of use, I will use iTunes for the techniques in this column. But many of these features can be found in other excellent music-library managers, such as MediaMonkey, MP3 Rage, Winamp or Windows Media Player.
The first fundamental technique you want to start incorporating into your library is creating relationships between similar songs. By recognizing unique similarities and patterns within your sets, you can create intelligent groupings of music to pull up on the fly. Let me give you a simple example that I use in every set. During the early or warm-up part of a set, you may want to play music that is more mellow, unique or relatively unknown. However, those songs often exist in many different genres, tempos and playlists. Every time I run across such a song, I simply put “early” in the Comment field. Then there is a common thread within those songs that you can take advantage of later. Don't just limit yourself to moods; this can be very helpful in grouping styles, tempos or both. For example, cut-time records — think of the rhythm from Outkast's “Hey Ya!” — are found in many places, including drum ‘n’ bass, breaks, '80s dance, some current pop music and a lot of classic dance tracks. Cut-time songs (as in two beats per bar versus four) are great but don't mix very well with songs that aren't cut time. So wouldn't it be great if you could intelligently pull up all of the cut-time records in your collection at a given time? It's easy: Just stick the name of a song you associate with that rhythm in the ID3 tag. I like to use “Hey Ya!” Now, think of five to 10 styles/tempos or types of music that don't fall into your genre or tempo organization but you commonly use and need immediate access to. Put a related name in an open ID3 field of each MP3 file.
This can be a daunting task, especially if you already have a lot of songs. Ideally, every time you load a new song, you will recognize if it falls into any of your usual groupings and add the appropriate tags. To get your existing collection up and going, I suggest creating a blank playlist first. Then go through your existing genres and playlists that most likely contain the style you are looking for. As you come across one, don't enter the style name yet. Just drag it over to that new playlist. Once you're done, select them all with Command + A (Mac) or CTRL + A (PC) and edit the entire group's info with Command + I (Mac) or CTRL + I (PC). Now you can put the name you want in the Grouping field, and all those tracks will get that tag. One caveat, though: That will erase all info in that field for every track, so you may not want to use the Comment section, which could contain information you want to retain.
SMART PLAYLISTS
Here is the magic catalyst and an often underused feature of iTunes that will bring it all together: Smart playlists are constantly scanning your collection and looking for any and all parameters that you tell them to. They are really only as smart as you make them. It's very easy to create a smart playlist that automatically looks for the existence of an “early” tag in the Comment section, as it will dynamically create and update the playlist for you. Now all you need to do is add the right tags to songs as you buy them, and iTunes will keep it all organized for you. The really powerful part is that you can specify as many rules as you want. For instance, one smart playlist could require the following matches: Comment field contains “early,” Genre contains “downtempo,” Grouping contains “ethnic,” Date Added to collection is in the past “six” months. Now you have the perfect ethnic warm-up set of new material at your fingertips.
I have barely scratched the surface of all the ways you can use iTunes to help rock your sets. The important thing is to start investigating the tools available to you and figuring out what will work with your style. There is a whole world of “scripts” that you can also install to make iTunes even more powerful. (Imagine automatically updating your whole library with album art from the Internet overnight!) Check out www.eangolden.com for links to my favorite scripts and script resources.
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