Mp3s | Digital DJ Tips

September 18th, 2011

Over To You: Best Place To Find MP3s Of Out-Of-Print Music?

by Phil Morse

Out of print vinyl: Not coming to an MP3 store near you any time soon?

Reader Redd writes: “Is there a record pool for out of print or hard to find music in MP3 format? It’s easy enough to find new stuff, but what about older records?”

Digital DJ Tips says: That’s an interesting question, because the is a lot of music that hasn’t been officially digitised and put on sale yet. I personally can think of whole piles of white labels, 12″s and undergrounds bootleg-style tunes from the old skool rave days that I know aren’t available on any MP3 stores.

12 Comments »

September 15th, 2011

Confessions of a Music Junkie: How I Kicked My 25,000 MP3 Habit

by Joshua Routin

Following on from our reader’s question about trimming a 40k+ library of music last Sunday, we’ve got a confession from a similar DJ who’se seen the error of his ways and spent the time to put things right. Here’s his story about how he got back on the straight and narrow:

I have spent the last 17 months (I’m not joking or exaggerating about that) going over my 25,000+ song library. I had accumulated this library over the last 15 years, and knew there were gems in there I would love to play. Unfortunately, among my vinyl rips and legally acquired music, there was a lot of music I’d downloaded / ripped / acquired from websites, friend’s binders, or other recommendations.

21 Comments »

September 10th, 2011

Your Questions: How Do I Tidy Up 44,000 MP3s?

by Phil Morse

As Gizmo from Skratchworx wonderfully illustrates in this graphic (see link in text to original), if digital music were actually vinyl, people would think twice about amassing such huge collections. This is 20,000 songs - less than half of what our reader is trying to get to grips with.

Reader Samet writes: “I would like to tidy up my three-year-old music collection. I’ve got a lot of compilations, monthly-separated single downloads and set mixes. My problem is there are a lot of duplicates between compilations and single downloads and also some of them are a poor quality because of downloading randomly.

“I want to get rid of them but there are 44,000 files and i dont know how to do it easily. There is a lot of software on the web for finding duplicate files but many of the file tags are written in different formats so they’re not that useful. Editing 40,000+ files is hard work for me. I wish there were an easier way.

33 Comments »

November 4th, 2010

How Often Do You Have An MP3 Spring Clean?

by Phil Morse

Recycled beats: How often do you clear out your MP3 playlist?

I have had a few weeks off DJing. My main residency ended at the start of September when the tourists went home (I play in a resort town), and what with my own holidays and some unlucky bad weather (my gigs tend to be on beach bar terraces), I’ve not actually played since then.

So when it came to preparing my tunes for the Halloween gig I had booked, I was looking at lots of old, uninspiring music. The short of it was, I didn’t want to play most of it. I decided to be brutal – I cleared out a real big load of stuff to clear the way for the tunes I’ve been collecting since last DJing. I realised I tend to do this maybe three times a year – definitely some time after New Year, again before summer, and around now.

20 Comments »

October 23rd, 2010

Your Questions: How Do I Organise My Music Better in Traktor?

by Phil Morse

With all its other features, there's little physical room for browsing and sorting music in Traktor.

Reader Tony Corless writes: “I moved on to Tractor Pro and Kontrol X1 a few months back. I like it but I find organizing my music a pain. I don’t use iTunes but have my music separated into folders of old skool / rnb / party / rock / dance etc.

“The main box of recent stuff has about 600 tunes in now and it’s hard to manage – even some of the playlists with about 60 tunes can be a pain. I used CDs for ages and used to burn best of CDs and it was easy just to go straight to the CD that I wanted.

11 Comments »

September 3rd, 2010

7 Deadly Sins of Record Collecting (And How to Avoid Making Them)

by Phil Morse

Are your records leading you astray? Repent while you can!

As a digital DJ, your tunes are the tools of your trade. They’re not a collection! “Collection” implies a quest for completion. It implies looking at rather than using. It implies that the act of collecting is the whole point – like collecting stamps or fridge magnets.

As a DJ I used to be pretty brutal with my records – they were already “tools of the trade”for me. I’d put them in white sleeves if the originals were flimsy, and throw the originals way; lend and borrow them; buy them again when they wore out. But I knew people who were plastic-sleeves-and-all-in-alphabetical-order types too – lots of people like that.

15 Comments »