Managing the "Preselection" playlist in Traktor Pro

[lsmith]

So at my first gig I did the following. Please note that I am totally at the beginning of DJing. I imported all of my rating 5 tracks, plus I hand imported a view tracks that I knew would fly with the crowd. I placed them in a "Preselection" playlist that I loaded into my favorites. I then tried to cluster the songs in that list a bit by genre and other criterias. The idea being that if I feel that the crowd now wants to hear lets say a bit of disco, I can just select the given cluster and move it into the "Preparation" playlist. I will need to look into creating a keyboard short cut for move, but for now I just added them and then manually deleted them. This way the lists both stayed manageable in size.

In the "Preparation" playlist I ensured that things would be ordered in the order I actually want to play things, though I did not enable automatic loading of tracks when a track finished. If I then decided to skip a track I moved it back to the "Preselection" list. Since I would edit the same cluster, it would mean I would import the "disco cluster" with about 10 tracks and then move back about 5 tracks in practice because I then wanted to move to a different style again.

This worked out quite well for me and made sure I had enough time to add some cue points since I had to spend less time on searching for the next song to play.

[Karlos Santos]

This will all become much easier in v1.2 as the Preparation Playlist will be improved.
The Collection will feature diamond icons of track that are in the Prep List so you will be able to see which tracks in your Preselection List are already in the Prep list . Also "Append/add next" menu functions which will make what you do easier.