music library management | Digital DJ Tips

May 12th, 2013 Training

Over To You: How Do You Use The Genre Tag In iTunes?

by Phil Morse

The famous Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music – but be aware you can get lost in the rabbithole of genres outlined here!

Digital DJ Tips reader Dennis writes: “My iTunes database is a monster. I have many years’-worth of music in there and then some. I knew I needed to clean things up and so I’ve started to do just that.

“I’ve realised that trying to apply a ‘genre’ to songs is a futile act for me! Especially with EDM I find that there are so many little pigeonholes people want to stuff songs into that I am not sure about any of the genres I apply to music except when they are really, really, really broad.

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August 12th, 2012 Training

Over To You: How Can I Avoid Buying The Same Song Twice?

by Phil Morse

How do you prevent yourself accidentally buying the same tune twice?

Digital DJ Tips reader Mr Lobow writes: “I’m a digital DJ since 2004 and like most people I suppose, at first I never worried about accidentally getting more than one copy of the same tune, because (I admit it) I downloaded freely from internet.

“But two years ago I saw the error of my ways and decided to only buy songs, as I started playing publicly and not just with friends and at private parties. However, when buying from Juno and Beatport, I have an annoying habit of buying tracks more than once! I find it easy to do this because tunes are often catalogued in different styles. Can you give me any advice on how to avoid this?”

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September 15th, 2011 News & Opinion

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.

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April 13th, 2011 DJ Culture

Get Minimal With Your Digital Music Collection!

by Phil Morse

Apply some minimalist principles to your music collection and become a better DJ because of it.

Spring brings thoughts of clearing the decks for a new season (with apologies to our southern hemisphere readers). Minimalists love this time of year as it’s the time when everyone tries to cut some clutter from their lives, not just them!

As I was sorting through the stacks of gear, boxes, leads, product CDs, batteries, instruction manuals, paperwork and so on that have piled up in the Digital DJ Tips office over the past 12 months as part of our own spring clean, it occurred to me that as digital DJs, we could benefit from applying a bit of minimalism to our digital music collections.

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