4 Easy Steps To Getting Control Of Your DJ Music Library

The biggest mistakes digital DJs make with their DJ library is completely losing control of it – not knowing where their music is, having lots of duplicates or lost files, having a library far too big for what they need (full of music they’re never going to DJ with), and not making simple changes to their software and workflow that make digital DJing so much easier.

Your DJ music library should not cause you grief, take a lot of your time, or be hard to DJ with. Set up correctly, it should just stay out of your way and let you get on with the important job of actually doing the DJing.

To put it another way, DJing is a messy, creative, random, unpredictable game, and if you’ve got a tidy, ordered, clean DJ library – far from constraining you, it helps you be part of all those initial things I mentioned that make DJing so much fun.

The beauty of the way we teach organising your music library, which is based upon the way vinyl DJs have always organised their records and has been proven over decades, is that I can explain it to you in five minutes.

Below I cover all the key points, and if you’re feeling brave you can just follow what I tell you here and finally get this done. Let’s go…

1. Organise your music on your computer first

1. At all times, know where your music actually is on your computer – “Show in finder”, “Open file location” etc are your friends here. A basic understanding of how computers handle files and folders is important for digital DJing
2. Move or copy all the music you want to DJ with (and not a single track more) into one folder on your main laptop’s hard drive – Never move it, rename it, or organise it once you have. No need to rename files, sub-divide your folder further – nothing. Just get a copy of every tune you want to DJ with in there
3. Back it up! – Keep a copy of this folder on a separate drive, in the cloud etc, preferably both. There is another back up you need to do too – we’ll get to that later

Read this next: The Playlist Pyramid – How To Build A DJ Music Collection To Be Proud Of

2. Set up an efficient main library view in your DJ software

1. As you add new tunes to your main computer folder, also import them to your DJ software – This is where you’re going to work on them from now on, but understand that your DJ software doesn’t move or copy the music; it just looks where you’re keeping it to know where it is (hence why you shouldn’t move your music outside of your DJ software). Make sure your DJ software “analyses” each track you add
2. Set the columns of your main library view in your DJ software – Organise them to give you: Title, Artist, Genre, Release Year, Date Added, BPM, Key. Manually fill in any gaps. Check this information is correct and standardise things like where you choose to list featured artists or collaborators (this one works well in the artist column) and where you put any remix or re-edit credits (this works well in the title column)
3. Optionally, add these extra columns and info – Enable artwork and add the artwork for each track that you want with it (web image searches are your friend). This usually works by dragging and dropping. If your software has a ratings column, add that and use the ratings for “energy level” which you guess between 1 and 5 for every track. Hint: If your software doesn’t have a ratings option, use the “comments” field and cut and paste star emojis to achieve the same thing
4. Learn how to sort and search – Know how to arrange A-Z, old-new, etc in your main library (hint: click the column headers) and how to search for tracks – the quicker you can navigate around your music, the easier it’ll be to find what you want quickly. Hint: Look up and learn the keyboard shortcuts for your software

 

 

3. Always DJ from playlists, not from your library

1. For every DJ set you perform, pack a “crate” – For every set (eg at a club, at a party, a livestream, a recorded DJ mix etc), start a new playlist in your DJ software and take time to go through your music manually, adding tracks to this playlist just for that event or performance. The same track can be in as many playlists as you like. Also, pack double the music you’ll need – This gives you a large enough set for you to have a choice, but not such a big set that you spend all your time frantically scrolling through your library
2. As you build these playlists for DJ sets, drag the songs into a rough order – Earlier songs at the top, later ones lower down. This further helps you to quickly find something good to play next as you’re DJing (you cannot do this in the library view, another good reason not to DJ from there). Hint: If it won’t let you change song order, click first on the column where each track has been given its own number
3. Remember your combos – Every time you discover tunes that mix well together, or that go well together, or that you frequently play together, put them in playlists of their own. Just add your tracks and give them descriptive titles – These “mini-sets” are the best way of quickly accessing songs that you are likely to play back to back
4. Use “smart” playlists – If your system supports it, consider using a small number of rules-based “smart playlists” to help you further organise your collection. For example, if you play mobile gigs and club gigs, you could set up a playlist where the rules include all your house, techno, trance, and drum & bass tracks to give you an overall view of your club music, and another one where all your urban, oldies, pop, R&B etc go to give you an overall view of your mobile DJ music
5. Use all this work to make building individual DJ set playlists easier and faster – Over time, you’ll find it becomes simpler and quicker to build playlists for DJ sets because you’ll be referring to songs that worked in previous sets (which you’ve saved), tracks that mix well together (from your mini sets, which you’ve saved) and be working from big views of suitable music (from your “smart playlists”) to build individual performance sets. You’ll only go into your main library to maybe grab a handful of newer songs or to quickly scroll through looking for tracks that fit the vibe in addition to what you’ve already chosen for that event

Learn to DJ with us: The Complete DJ Course

4. Keep on top of it

1. Audit regularly – Whenever you can (ideally once a month at minimum), go through the collection and remove songs you’ll never play, update the music in your mini-sets, and so on. Pro tip: Always listen to tracks while you’re doing it – make it a rule not to work on your DJ library in silence, ever
2. Add and remove carefully – In particular, never add a song to your DJ software or remove a song from your DJ software without listening to it all the way through – in the first instance because you need to check it sounds good and has no surprises, in the second instance because you may remember why you liked a song in the first place if you listen before deleting!
3. Keep it all tidy – As you build up playlists from previously performed DJ sets and as you build lots of useful “mini-sets”, nest these playlists in folders to keep everything tidy – call them “Previous Sets” and “Mini Sets” or similar. This means you can easily hide them when you don’t need them, and access them when you do
4. Follow your DJ software’s instructions for how to back up its own database – Backing up the music files as per above is not enough, as things like cues, loops, waveforms etc and the playlists themselves live away from your music files. If in doubt, look in your computers “Music”, “My Music”, Documents”, “My Documents” folder and find a folder named after your DJ software, e.g. “_Serato_”, and back up that
5. Wanna tweak? Sure, but keep it simple – Want to add cloud so you can use your collection on more than one laptop? Like to add a streaming service? Want to use a utility that allows you to transfer your collection so you can use it on a different piece of DJ software? Fine – but remember, the simpler your music library is to set up and maintain, the more time you’ve got for actual DJing. Keep it simple, for the lifetime win

Read this next: 7 Ways To Back Up Your DJ Library

Finally…

Want more help? In our book Rock The Dancefloor! we go into great detail about all aspects of digital music for DJs: not just organising your library, but also how to find and buy music, music file formats, laptop performing vs exporting your library, and so on. You can get a free copy of the book here.

If you’d prefer me to teach you what’s in the book, our Complete DJ Course is the “course of the book” and is a phenomenal investment for when you’re ready to properly learn the five steps of DJing as we teach them (Gear, Music, Mixing, Performing & Success).

And for a real deep dive into all of the above, our DJ Music Library Blueprint lessons in our Digital DJ Lab training cover every single detail of what I just described. It’s far and away the most popular of the hundreds of lessons that programme offers and has helped thousands of DJs to implement an advanced version of this.

Finally, please feel free to ask any questions right here – the comments are open, and we’d be more than happy to help.