I have an iPad Pro 4th Generation 1tb, iPadOS 18.3 with 300 GB free space and Djay Pro 5.2.8
What is the best way to organize the music files in the files app on the iPad? My library on my MacBook has more than 30.000 tracks. I will condense my library, but will probably end up with more than 10.000 files on the iPad.
When I access the files in djay pro in the files app it takes sometimes more than a few seconds for the tracks to show up. Also the search is sometimes very slow, I even experienced music interruptions and even crashes when searching the whole library.
In the moment i sort my files on the iPad in a folder called music and in subfolders with the artists name. Is it better to put all files in one folder or many folders containing only a few tracks?
Help is appreciated
My Collection
The fastest solution for large libraries is to āimportā the tracks into My Collection. you can do this by importing directly into My Collection (faster), or analyzing your tracks in the Files section (can take some time). Importing/Analyzing tracks creates records in the djay Pro database with track info like location of the file and metatags - which is much, much faster for searching/managing your library.
Files
This part of djay Pro is the slowest and most affected by large libraries as itās dealing directly with the file system. It will benefit the most from using sub-folders with small groups of tracks.
Re: Single Folder vs. Sub-Folders
Neither option is wrong, but it does affect your workflow.
Sub-folders work great and makes things easier to manage, but when tracks donāt fit into one category, you face the options: like needing duplicate tracks, to make sure you do not have āmissingā tracks in those folders OR maybe over-organizing the tracks into too many sub-folders making it harder to search. For example, some tracks are created by multiple artists, which folder should it go into? Do you duplicate the tracks for each artist or do you have a separate folder for that artist collaboration? What if the track is a remix? Does it go into the original artist folder or is there a folder for the remix artist? And what if itās a cover of an original artist? Where does that go: under the cover artist or the original artist? To make things really complicated, what if itās a cover of an original artist collaboration but then remixed by a DJ? Where does that go?
And I do not want to get started when folders are organized by genre ā¦
Single Folder
Personally, I keep all tracks in one folder. Itās easier to manage and transfer to other software. But I do have to pay critical attention to file names so that I do not get duplicates that accidentally overwrite another track with the same name. Metadata becomes very, very important - because Iām managing the tracks inside music/DJ software and it is also what I use to create file names in MP3Tag.
Notes:
My track names are always āoriginal artist - album/compilation - track titleā followed by other misc. info that might be needed. The renaming is done from MP3Tag. I like this naming scheme because when I search files directly, I usually search by artist.
I do have āsub-foldersā for playlists that I use a lot. But those sub-folder/playlists are completely separate from my main library and contain duplicates of all tracks in the main library. Mainly for gigs where I donāt need to bring all my music and also for USB sticks/CDJs.
One folder and The ipad canāt cope with that many files.
Too many sub folders and youāll be there forever.
You will need to break your library into manageable chunks.
Can you try say organising into singular genre folders? And adding 1 by 1.
Many thanks for your contributions. I will try out some of your suggestions and clean out the library while Iām at it. In more than 30 years od DJing, a lot of stuff has accumulated.
I manage my library on the Mac with iTunes and unfortunately it stores the tracks not in the format artist - track title. I use Evertag on the iPad for renaming.
You can probably get better results using "my collection"in djay on the mac.
I discovered that it was easier to use than evertag, you can focus on the variables that really matter and also any data I applied within dj got applied to my files anyway and showed up in evertag.
Try a few tracks and see how it works out.
