I was asked the following question by a member and with my long reply, I though it would be decent to share with you all.
a lot has been covered, & there may be some stuff people can add
Some of it is very noobish, but I wanted to explain in its entireity
This is how I do it & may be of help & guidence to some.
Yes.hey man, so you're just making playlists in itunes and using those when doing your sets?
My procedure as of late has been a long but rewarding one.
Once I got the hang of itunes (wasn't a fan at first but with some tweaking, ie settings so it dosn't duplicate all my tracks etc.) I'm a fanboy
Once I download a track I do the following (some is personal preference)
- ananlyse in Mp3Gain
- analyse in MIXED IN KEY
- drag to itunes (finalise tags & give rating)
- Import to traktor (there are a few steps I go to before this, as follows)
Once in itunes I select the track, right click & then select get info. (this is where I make sure all my tagging is up to date, mainly genre & key for the smart playlists)
NOTE: I also give my tracks another listen & give a rating. I keep it simple and relevants across the genres rather than specific ratings for each catagory.
1 star = soft/mellow/chillaxed etc.. through to 5 star = the big Big heavy hitters etc.
Inside of itunes I have smart playlists of all my genres. So once a track is tagged it will automatically put it in its specific smart playlist.
smart playlists are great as it keeps things organised.
then it is just a matter of creating any playlist you want and dragging your tracks into that. wala
A good rule to follw once you get on top of all your tags is what I stick to , it was in the blog a while ago.
TAG OFTEN, TAG EARLY.
now this has been a tedious progress as I have rinsed and repeated many times till I was happy with the results. But once I got use to itunes it all fell into place.
1st thing I would recomend, and what i did is in the following order.
- clear traktors collection and update.
- clear itunes collection and update
- fine tune all your preferred settings in traktor and export the tsi file (you will find the big export button at the bottom of setting) this way you always have that clean slate to fall back on
- fine tune all itunes settings
so now everything is a clean slate to make a fresh start. this is a big help IMO.
Next steps
- import all your tracks to itunes
- create smart playlists ( I have everything from pop, rock, easy listening, drum & bass, tech house, psy/goa, House etc...) you will see these fill up as you go.
sounds daunting but itunes sorts this out for you based on the tags
here is a good link SMART PLAYLISTS
- from here I can make my own playlists a lot quicker by browsing through the smart playlists
take your time with it so you only have to do it once, it may take a few nights and a few cold ones, and mayby a bit of nagging form the wife in regard's spending no quality time together, but thats another story
I even make sure all my genres are listed the same. lets use Hip Hop & Rap for an example..
*sometimes it is tagged as hip-hop/rap and sometimes it is tagged with rap & hip hop or whatever. you can select all of them in itunes at once and change so the tags are the same. same procedure select all and choose get info, itunes will ask if you want to change multiple files, select YES then you can change and fine tune the genre. (it is impotant that you only do this for Genre though) eg. Rap/Hip-Hop, this will keep things even tidyer and narrow down your smart playlists. with all the sub genres these days, it can get a bit confusing.
So now you have everything sorted. thankgod you can move onto traktor.
close itunes as you can access this through traktors browser.
Inside of traktor in the browse column, scroll down to itunes and select, you will now see all of your hardwork inside of itunes, including playlists and subfolders. hooray
you can then select on a folder and import to collection, traktor works better and smoother when tracks are imported to collection.
you only need to import once, and once you have you can browse through your itunes folders and play form there.
On a side note, it is not uncommen for me to clear traktors collection on occasion and only import what I need. (also best done prior to performance)
Also another good thing to have selected in traktor is to check consistency on start up. A consistency check will show you what tracks are missing then you can reimport the missing ones
*missing tracks are caused by moving files in your hard drive* dont panic though as traktor is only a host and does not actually store your track, simply points to & plays them from the location on your Hard drive/computer.
I hope This has been of some help.
Good luck & always happy to help to the best of my knowledge
P.S. a special thanks to all the forum members who I have gained this handy information from. and thankyou to the community for making it a great place to be a part of. THANKYOU
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