Snacktime

Ok, so I know it got to be a smidgen annoying back in the day, but I think it’s probably worth immortalizing in my blog.  Feast your eyes on the internets favorite squirrel.

Squirrel Song and Dance

Too much free time on hands, for sure….

View Video on YouTube

Watch this guy pwn.

http://www.break.com/index/the-worlds-greatest-tetris-player.html

First off, this procedure assumes that you have the little box ‘Let iTunes keep my music organized’ button UNCHECKED. If you have this box checked then you are on your own as you will find that sooner or later iTunes is going to screw up your shiite big time. At some point, when I have time, I’ll post a migration plan for getting you out of this situation…but that could be a long time coming.

Now the problem is…when you move your music to a different machine or even a different folder on the same machine and you open up iTunes, you’ll notice a lot of broken links (most likely all of them). Do not fret…simply do the following:

1. Close iTunes
2. Make a backup of your iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Music Library.itl files. They are located in C:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\My Music\iTunes by default.
3. Open the iTunes Music Library.xml file in Wordpad and do a search and replace for all occurrences of your current drive/directory location and replace with your new location. Note that directories are separated with a forward slash, and all spaces in directory names must be escaped as %20. Depending on the size of your XML file, this could take a while.
4. Now, you need to corrupt your current .itl database file. The easiest way to do this is to open it up in Wordpad and just delete the contents of the entire file, then save it. You should have a zero byte file.
5. Lastly, open iTunes and let it rebuild your database. After it scans in all of your mp3’s, it will tell you that the .itl file is damaged and ask if it’s ok to rebuild it. Let it rebuild the database, and when it’s all done, you are all set!
6. Crack open a cold one and get crunk! Your back in business as if by magic!!!!

Thanks to Rob Brooks-Bilson for figuring this shit out. It was a life saver for me.

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/ .

I’m here in Toronto on business for IBM. Today I mostly got my bearings and met with members of the WebSphere Install Team. I took some time and looked up a bunch of Toronto IBMers who’s names I remember and then randomly popped in on them at their respective offices. It was pretty cool.

I have 5:30PM reservations at Rodney’s Oyster House on King St. Going to get some delicious oysters and hopefully a few decidedly Canadian beers. Should be a smashing good time, eh?

Meat-loving cow found gobbling up chickens….whoa!!!