Sorting Tracks

Hi!

I've worked for over 10 years as pro DJ. Now I'm thinking about leaving all the vinyls and CDs and to use a Mac Book Pro with Traktor and an Xone:3D. Before changing the whole system I'd be glad to know about your experiences with Traktor.

How do you sort your tracks? I play music of different styles, time, remixes... Is it possible to use something like "tags"?

Can I use pictures of CD-covers to visually remember a track?

Does Traktor work with my iTunes-library?

I'm afraid of losing a great song anywhere in a nirvana of 100.000 songs....

How do you work?

Thank you!

Mr.P

 

hi there.

traktor is quite versatile in this regard. you can import your library from itunes and have the 2 things working in harmony with relatively little hassle. you can also make playlists in itunes and import them too.

there is a good search facility in traktor 3 which will search all the 'tags' in your music collection.

download the demo and try it out. it will not harm your itunes collection (it may remove any artwork you have added to MP3 files, though).

 

One extremely useful thing in Traktor is you have fields for genre, BPM, artistname etc for all tracks in the Traktor collection (these fields can also be optionally stored in the MP3 tags if you are using MP3s like most of us). You can click on the column headings for these fields in the Traktor tracks browser to quickly sort the tracks by those fields. With collections of say 5,000 tracks the sorting is almost instantaneous.

There are other ways to sort, organize, and search for tracks with Traktor too, such as with playlists. The "finder" text search works great for example when you want to find a track and you just remember something as little as part of a word from the track title.

I always get a BIG LAUGH when I see threads on DJ forums where people discuss different ways to organize their CDs. Dealing with hundreds of CDs and re-burning them in various orders, writing labels with BPM annotations etc, seems so stone-age.

 

when i started with traktor i missed the covers - but i'm loving instead my personal comments and tags.

besides more easy to understand tags like *dancefloor*, *starter* etc. i use tags like *car rider* or *redneck around* etc.

i'm using tags excessively and i had never a more organized collection than now! ;-)