Snacktime

How I organize my music with Serato and iTunes

Posted on September 23rd, 2007 by Snack.
Categories: Random.

So many people ask me, they say ‘Snack…I see you using Serato and I can’t help but wonder…with all that music you have, how exactly do you manage to find everything and be such a kick-ass DJ all of the time?’ The answer, my friends, is summed up in one word…organization. That said, prepare for a marathon article here, I’m going to lay it all out complete with screenshots.

Before I get started, let me just pay homage to a one, DJ CZER whose process on which mine is largely based.

Before you read the following procedure, you may be asking yourself, ‘But Snack, why would I want to follow the procedure you’re about to discuss?’. While this methodology may not be for everyone, I enjoy the following benefits from using it:

• Being uniformly anal with my tags and naming convention allows me to find stuff FAST
• I know where ALL my stuff is…it’s not all over the freaking place buried in a mass of unknown folder names
• The fact that I know where everything is at all times makes backup and restore a breeze
• My favorite…when I have a gig coming up, I create a new regular playlist for it. Then I let iTunes play through my tracks (or some subset of them) as I work or hang out and, if I hear something I want to play at the gig, I drag it into the newly created playlist. The result? BLAM! on gig nite, I have a custom Crate in Serato. (this also makes doing set lists much easier)
• Since I tag all my tracks with BPM info, I can add this column to Serato and sort by it…helping me gradually jack up or down the energy of the night as needed

First off, this article makes a few assumptions:

1. You use a PC
2. You have the ‘Let iTunes organize your music’ and ‘Copy music to my iTunes Folder on import’ boxes UNCHECKED (this is very important because iTunes has a really whack way of putting things in folders by artist which makes it very difficult to keep track of your music when you have a lot of it)
3. You use Serato

Now, you need to install a couple of tools to make your life easier. They are:

1. Mixmeister BPM Analyzer
2. MP3 Tag Tools

OK….here we go…..

Step 1 - Create Folders for Each Genre

Create folders for each genre you have. This could be as simple as ‘House’, ‘Breaks’, and ‘Hip-Hop’ or it could be more granular such as ‘Non Vocal Gay House’, ‘Vocal Gay House’, ‘Really Really Gay House’, ‘Breaks’, ‘Gangsta Rap’, ‘Gay Gangsta Rap’……u get the idea. The point is, the names of the genres are entirely up to you. NOTE: If you have only one genre in your collection, you probably don’t have a need for the robust framework this process details and, and as a side note, you’re also probably a really crappy DJ…but I digress…. Here’s what mine looks like right now:

Step 2 - Sort Yo Shiite
Sort your files by genre and put them in the appropriate directory. Make sure you don’t have sub directories under your genre directory. Here’s an example of what your dirs will look like once we’re done with this process:

Step 3 - Use the BPM Analyzer

Open up Mixmeister BPM Analyzer and drag your genre folder(s) into it. The program will analyze all of your files and automatically update the BPM tag with the right value for each track. This could take a while depending on how many songs you have so crack a cold one and chill out for a minute, put in a load of laundry, stroke your goatee, or do whatever it is you do to pass the time.

Step 4 - Fill Out Genre, Artist, Title, and Album Tags

Do this however you like…just make sure you do it. You’ll see why its so crucial shortly. I like to use iTunes for this step, but you can use Windows if you like. If you do use iTunes, make sure that before you drag your files in, that you disable the ‘Keep iTunes Folder Organized’ and ‘Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library’ options located in Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced. If you’re using iTunes, when you’re done editing these tags, select all and delete the tracks from iTunes. This won’t actually delete your files, it will only remove them from iTunes’ internal DB. I know it seems counter productive, but trust me. We’ll be reimporting for good momentarily.

Step 5 - Open Up MP3 Tag Tools to do the batch renaming and IDv3/IDv2 tag copying

Open up MP3 Tag tools and point it to the directory of one of your genre’s. You’ll need to do this separately for each folder. Once open, make double sure you’re Genre, Artist, Title, and Album tags are filled in. Also, make sure you select the checkbox ‘Use Filename Format’. See the picture below. Note how the filenames are all jacked up:

Select all the track using either Control-A or by Shift clicking with your mouse then click ‘Rename Files’ and viola!…u end up with this:

Isn’t that pretty? Ok….so now we have at least 1 genre folder all tagged up with the files uniformly named. Let’s now copy our IDv3 tags to IDv2 just in case we want to play these MP3s on a burned CD in a device that only supports IDv3. With MP3 tag tools, it’s very simple. Make sure everything is selected the right-click and select ‘Copy ID3v1.1 <--- ID3v1.2' . Now it's time to get to the good stuff. So far it seems like a lot of overhead, but once you get familiar with the process you'll find that it goes pretty quick and the benefits make it well worth the effort as we'll soon see.

Step 6 - Import Into iTunes and Create a 'Smart Playlist'

Open up iTunes. If you've followed my instructions so far, you shouldn't have anything in there right now. Type Control-N to create a new playlist. This one is only temporary and serves only to get the files into the iTunes DB. Name the playlist something arbitrary...like 'zzzzz'. Click on the playlist and drag your genre folder into it. You can now delete the temporary playlist if you like....though I often keep it around....renaming it 'newshit-' so that I can listen to the new tracks at my leisure in iTunes while I work.

Now that your files are in, setup a 'Smart Playlist'. Do this by typing Control-Alt-N or by going to File -> New Smart Playlist. Name the playlist the same as your genre or whatever name you want it to appear as in Serato as a crate. I have one Smart Playlist (i.e. Crate) per genre. So, using this example, I’m dealing with Techno, so that’s the name I use. Once you’ve named the playlist, right click on it and select ‘Edit Smart Playlist’. This is where we will setup our rules. Note that you can get as creative as you want with this…..use whatever works for you. You could set it up to look for certain text in any tagged field or combination of tagged fields. Add additional rules by using the ‘+’ button. I’m using a simple case below where Genre is exactly equal to ‘Techno’:

Once you have your Smart Playlist(s) setup, every time you add new music to DB, the tracks will automatically show up in the appropriate playlist and, as a result, will show up in the Serato Crate of the same name.

Step 6 - Open Up Serato and enable iTunes Integration

Open Serato and click ‘Setup’ in the upper right hand part of the screen. Click the checkbox called ‘Read iTunes Library’. Click setup again to go to the main Serato screen and BLAM! There are all your playlists listed a crates….yay!!!!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here or just hit me up on http://www.gruvglu.us/ .

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