criticaldistance

like many working dj’s, i find it extremely tough and time consuming to keep my music library organized, under control and efficient as possible. the convenience of the digital dj’ing revolution has brought some consequences along with it; namely the volume of music a dj can carry with him.

while some would claim this is a benefit of going digital (and i agree to some extent), it can also be a total nightmare to quickly locate the perfect track to play at any given time. at least with vinyl, the dj was limited to the number of records he/she was willing to carry and had the luxury of nifty sleeve designs and labels to help in quickly locating the right track in his/her crate. being a visual person, i always found myself associating the certain “sound” of a record to the design on the sleeve or label.

now, with thousands of “faceless” digital tracks in my library, my job has become much harder. search is great, if you remember the artist name, track name, label or catalog number… but who can keep track of hundreds or even thousands of names and numbers? no one! it’s just not practical. sure, you could just organize all of your tracks into virtual crates in scratchlive, but that is so tedious, and most of us already have some organizational structure set up in itunes already. but how can you optimize it?

enter my new favorite app: quicksilver! (and a sweet script called tunetag)

i’m not going to go through a comprehensive tutorial here. that has already been done on the apple blog, and they did a fantastic job; much better than i could ever do. i’m merely showing a possible implementation of their method for easily tagging files in itunes.

first things first: if you haven’t already, download quicksilver. it really will change the way you use your mac. you can get it here. if you’ve never used it before, i highly recommend going through as many of the getting started tutorials and walkthoughs as you can. it can be a little intimidating at first, but once you get it, you’ll never go back.

then watch this screencast from the apple blog.

since i have no need to create a static playlist of tracks that i tag, i’ve completely skipped the whole part about querytunes… and only use tunetag to add descriptive keywords to the comments field of the current track playing in itunes. add as many as you want, i would venture to say the more the better. tagging is what it’s all about!

i tag tracks with keywords like ‘hard’ or ‘techy,’ ‘groovy’ or ‘funky’… you could go one step further and tag tracks with key information, chord progression, etc… whatever. the point is to tag them! quicksilver and tunetag make this part easy because you can do it with a few keystrokes. this works great for me because i’m usually listening to music while i’m working on other things, so i can quickly tag the song in the background while i keep plugging away at something else.

once you have some tracks tagged, you can set up smart playlists that scan the comments for any and/or all tags you want. and because smart playlists are so flexible, you can set up really intricate patterns to match for, allowing you to build diverse yet compatible playlists quickly and easily. this is where getting creative with your tagging comes in to play. experiment for yourself and find what works best for you.

before a set i’ll normally set up a few smart playlists, scanning for tracks with certain sound characteristics that i want to play, which get updated on the fly as i tag more and more tracks. the playlists are then ready to go in scratchlive automatically (if you have ‘read iTunes playlists’ enabled). i can also search directly in scratchlive for multiple tags, so i’m not just limited to using the playlists. this helps me dictate the pace and flow of my set and makes it easy to adjust mood, progression and overall vibe depending on the crowd response.

if you found this useful, drop me a line. also, i would love to hear from fellow dj’s out there on how you go about managing your ever growing music libraries… and any tips or tricks you’ve encountered along the way.