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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: DJ Music Library Tips?
I recently started building my music library more seriously and realized… things get messy FAST. 😅 After a few gigs where I couldn’t find the right track quickly enough, I knew I needed to rethink my organization system.

At a lounge set, I wanted to switch vibes from deep house to chill R&B, and I knew I had the perfect track... but couldn’t find it in time. Spent too long scrolling and ended up defaulting to a safe choice. The crowd didn’t notice, but I was annoyed at myself 🤦‍♂️

So how do you tag or organize your tracks? Do you use folder structures or metadata (genre, mood, BPM)? Any tools or best practices you’d recommend?
 
geposted Fri 06 Jun 25 @ 7:21 am
I just use instant filters with the music category in the genre field. So if I'm on my main video collection I can just hit "disco" and all the disco tracks show up instantly.

You can also double up so if the genre is set as PARTY and DISCO it will show up on both filters.
 
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! That sounds like a really smart and efficient way to organize things, I hadn’t thought about using genre filters like that. I’ll definitely give it a try and see how it works for my setup. Appreciate you sharing your workflow!
 
To add to the useful layout suggestions that @kradcliffe has already given:

I use filter folders to list things I want more permanent access to (like Genres or Decades), and then I use Quick Filters to filter on things that I only want a temporary view of while playing (like songs within +/-3% of the current song's BPM, songs with a Key Difference of 0 compared to the current song or only Clean tracks (tagged with #Clean), songs with no cues, etc).

IMO, the current Quick Filter listing could use an update for organizing filter buttons and displaying more filter buttons before going to a fallback context menu list (e.g. adding more rows, and someone already made a request for all of this), and that's probably the main reason I don't have too many quick filters/lean towards filter folders more.

I use color rules to display relative moods of tracks based on ratings + tags (e.g. a high energy track in red, a chill/cooldown track in blue).
 
This method is fantastic! If you've just added, say, around 200 new tracks to your library, how do you quickly and efficiently batch-fix or update their metadata?
 
I use MP3tag before importing them to VDJ.
 
To add on to the already helpful advice, some things I do:

-Instant filters for bpm +/- 5% and compatible keys. Most of the time I'm in a playlist with these filters on, and if I'm struggling to find something I remove the key filter, then go from there.
-Linked Tracks
-Standardizing genre naming for ease of typing. R&B becomes RNB, Hip-hop becomes HipHop.
-Adding intuitive spelling into the comments for ease of searching so I don't have to remember exact spelling or numbers (ie buy u a drank might have the comment buy you a drink, 1 2 step has the comment one two step).
-Adding whatever my brain thinks of when thinking of the track that's not in any other data to the comment. Could be a phrase from a verse or anything that makes me think of the song. Anytime I have one of those moments my brain is locked up and I can think of something about the track that's not in any metadata, I add it to the comment so I can search it in the future.
 
Kradcliffe: How do you keep them from making the search field smaller?
 
I use filter folders and user tags... this became very handy in rekordbox and I love to use this in vdj.