Organising MP3s for DJing

I have seen countless people asking on forums how you organise, store, sort and play MP3s for DJing. I was, until not long ago, one of the people asking (thanks to THP and Baggy at Cosmic Disco for being the answerer of many a question). It’s only been the last 6 months that I have changed over from being a “vinyl only” man to using MP3s as well.

It started with the bar I play in regularly being CDJ only – and moved on from there. Ease of use on the digital download sites, removing crackles and pops from old vinyl on conversion… the reasons to change are numerous, but are not for all. I’m not writing this article to encourage anyone to change; that’s a personal choice of course. I’m writing this article to share with the world how I keep things organised, stored and ready to be played. This method might not be for everyone, some might only find part of it useful – but it works for me. Take from it what you will.

NB: As I use Serato Scratch, this heavily influences how I do things. However, it might be the same principle for other software/hardware solutions (Final Scratch, PC-DJ, et al).

Software

I use a number of different software packages…

• hdogg – recorder for recording WAV file
• Soundforge 9 (any editing software: audition, cooledit, etc. would also work) for cleaning and normalising files
• Media Monkey – MP3 organiser, tagger, etc.
• Mixmeister BPM Analyzer – writes the rough BPM of a file to the BPM field
• Scratchtools – little scripts that work wonders when used properly with your Serato library

Hardware

I also use hardware in the setup.

• Serato Scratch – you probably know what this does so I will refrain from explaining.
• Rugged USB drive – stores main MP3 collection and Serato library/crates

Organisation Structure

I try to keep things nice and simple for organising files, or else I just end up spending too much time trying to figure out whether a tune is disco, or disco funk, or funky disco, or… you get the picture I am sure. So I have the following folders setup that kind of encompass everything I play:

• disco
• funk
• contemporary
• electro

There are a few others in there, general stuff – but I don’t need to list them all. You get the idea and I am sure that you all have your own genre labeling preferences. I store this folder structure on my main computer – and also mirror it on the USB drive that I use for storing all the MP3s that I take with me to play out. On my main PC this folder structure is stored in a \newmusic directory, on the usb drive its just stored in the root. This means that any new tunes I purchase, or rip from vinyl, etc. go into \newmusic\<whatever genre>, and then, when I have cleaned up the meta information and what not (see “preparing the files” below), I simply copy all the directories and place them onto the USB drive – where all my new files merge with the masses of exciting and wonderful music I already have…

Preparing

Once the files have been added into the correct category in the \newmusic directory, its time to clean them up so that I have some consistency with naming and quality. This is a 3 stage process.

Stage 1 – Check the file quality, volume, etc.

The first stage is to load up the file into SoundForge (or whatever WAV editor you use) and clean it up. I usually run a normalize filter, then check that there is no extra silence at the start and end of the track. These things are not so much an issue if you have downloaded the file from an MP3 site like Juno Download, or Dance Tracks Digital but I usually have things to sort when I have recorded the file myself from vinyl. Once the file is sorted you can save as whatever file format you want (I always choose 320kbps MP3 but you might want a higher or lower quality file). Again, most files you purchase from the net will probably be in the correct file format in the first place.

Stage 2 – Clean up the meta data

Now we have the file we want to work with, it needs to have the correct title, artist, and so on. Without this, its a nightmare finding what you need when its added into the library. Media Monkey is your friend – although iTunes is probably just as good to those who are familiar with it (personally I despise it). Basically there are three things to do – get the title and artist information correct, auto-rename the file-name to match, and take out any of the crappy information you don’t need. For example, I don’t really ever use album art so it just gets deleted out. I also take the time here to make sure the case is correct (media monkey has a script you can run on all files that will do it automatically), the genre is correct to the folder the file is in, and that things are spelled correctly. Its probably a bit anal, but it bodes well for a better cataloged collection. I can now happily search on title and artist – knowing that all my files have the correct information to the best of my knowledge.

Stage 3 – BPM

This stage is not really the most important, although it does help from time to time. I have tried using a couple of different programs in the past to correctly analyze the BPM – and to be honest, all of them have their downfalls. Most of them don’t get the BPM quite right, or sometimes cant get it at all. It’s not even that often that I use the BPM – the style of mixing I practice (shit mixing) doesn’t ever really lend itself to the need for precise BPM. However, it helps – from time to time, I must admit – especially if its a tune I haven’t heard much and I need to make sure it will keep a certain tempo going. I settled using Mixmeister BPM Analyzer, because it’s accurate enough, and best of all – it’s free.

Organising (again)

So now with the files all cleaned up and ready to rock – all I do is merge them in with the existing files I have on my USB drive. It’s just a case of copying the same directory structure that’s in the \newmusic directory, and pasting it into the root of the USB drive.

Serato

(NB: this is only useful for those people who have a Serato system, as it’s pretty specific…)

Importing the new files into Serato used to be the most time consuming part of making my new music ready to play out. The Serato software is, sadly, lacking in many simple areas – especially if you are importing quite a lot of files in one go. I am still in the process of ripping my many hundreds of records – so I sometimes add many files all at the same time. And in Serato, unless you reconstruct all your crates from scratch, this means adding each file individually. A complete nightmare, unless you use iTunes, which will link into your Serato library. However, because I don’t use iTunes (and didn’t want to use it), I just couldn’t get what I wanted out of this method. And then I found Scratchtools.

Scratchtools is a utility that someone who used the Scratchlive Forums wrote. It works on both Mac and PC as its written in JAVA, and if you use Serato, but don’t use iTunes, it will be of incredible use. Basically, it’s a command line tool that lets me batch import files into Serato at the run of a command, synchronising a folder structure I have on my drive with crates in the Serato Library. It’s a little fiddly to get to grips with, but it fits my system perfectly. To start with I have the same crates in Serato as I have directories on my USB drive. To refresh you, these are something along the lines of…

• disco
• funk
• contemporary
• electro

So it’s fairly simple – when I add a tune to a folder on my USB drive – I want that to be reflected straight away in my Serato. Using scratchtools I run a batch file that I have setup, and this does that exact thing for me. It synchronises the crate in Serato with the drive, meaning that any new files I have added are picked up as soon as I load up the Serato interface, and also any files that I have deleted from the drives have been removed. Remarkable really. I suppose it’s even more remarkable that Serato doesn’t do that in the first place – but when you get such quality everywhere else, it’s easy enough to forgive this. There are many other things that scratchtools will do – it will allow you to move your entire library, organise the columns in every crate that you have, search for duplicates, and many other features that now I have them, I couldn’t do without. It’s simply the most important piece of the puzzle for me.

Rather than go into a whole tutorial on scratchtools here, as that could be another ten posts in itself, I will point out all the tutorials on the forums that I read and were of great use. You can also download the batchfile I run each time to update my library, just in case you wanted to use it as a starting template.

• Windows XP scratchtools Guide
• Making and using a batch file to save time with repeated functions
• Sync crates to folder
• Reset Columns

As I use a PC setup (running XP) – the above guides are for this system. There are Mac guides also available in the master forum: http://forum.scratchtools.de/list.php?6

Is that it?

Yes. And no. I hope that people pick up enough tips from here or send me some tips through on how I could improve this process. It takes quite a lot of my time, I admit, but it’s worth it. I have a collection thats really well organised now and finding things is a doddle. The biggest problem I have is remembering which track is which, not actually finding them.

MP3 DJing using Serato is something I initially looked at because I had to, and I’ll be honest, I am glad I did (and Cosmic Disco think so too). I still buy vinyl all the time – just that now I rip it. However you want to DJ, surely it doesn’t matter – as long as the music is good and people dance, that’s all that counts.

edit: as a follow up article, or maybe even a precursor to this one, I suggest you read Setting up and optimising your PC laptop for use with Serato. They compliment each other pretty well…

Possibly related posts:

• Backup your Serato MP3 collection.
• Setting up your laptop for Serato