So I am a longtime Traktor Pro user. I jumped ship last week after hearing about this AWESOME software. So far all good EXCEPT… I have over 60 subfolders on my local HD of my entire collection called MUSIC. My structure for example to get to a subfolde is:
MUSIC / SLOW / SLOW 50’s, SLOW 60’s, SLOW 70’s, etc.
Another Example:
MUSIC / LATIN / BACHATA, CUMBIA, etc…
MY QUESTION / PROBLEM… How can I search globally within my entire music folder? What if I don’t know that a slow song that I’m searching for is slow 60s or slow 70s for example? It seems like in this software I have to create playlists and put all of my slow 50s into a playlist called slow 50s. It only seems like the search ability of tracks is within an individual playlist and not my entire collection. Am I missing something? Somebody asks me for a slow song that I’m not sure if it’s 70s 80s or 90s, do I have to keep searching within each individual playlist created from my original folders? Before I go crazy trying to fix this I was hoping for some input on what I should do. I will definitely have playlists of my favorite songs in “BEST OF SLOW”, and “BEST 80’s 90’s 00’s DANCE” categories categories for example. Is it a problem if I drag every one of the songs in all of the subfolders into one massive playlist of my entire collection so that I can at least search and find a song that I have no idea what sub category it’s in? I hope this all makes sense. My concern is that having a playlist of over 50,000 songs will be a problem, but if not, this seems to be one solution I appreciate all your help in advance. Thank you.
There are two main tools for organizing your library:
Metadata (aka tags)
– Metadata is searchable/filterable inside djay pro. The Genre, Comments and Grouping fields are commonly used to hold metadata. For example: the metadata for a Salsa track that’s a slow mambo from the 70s, might look like this: Genre: Salsa, Comments: Mambo, 70s, Slow
– You can edit metadata for individual files in Djay pro (macOS only), but you’ll need a 3rd party program to make batch edits. MP3Tag is a popular metadata editor. In your case, you might update the files in your SLOW/50s folder with metadata like this: Comments: Slow, 50s. Then you will be able to search/filter files using that metadata.
Playlists
– You could replicate your sub-folder structure in djay pro. For example, you might have a Playlist Folder called Slow and inside you have several playlists for each decade: 50s, 60s, 70s etc.
– You can quickly create the 50s, 60s, 70s playlists by dragging the folders on the hard drive into Djay pro.
– You won’t be able to search or filter the tracks as effectively with this method, but you will be able to quickly scan the playlists to find what you are looking for.
Both these approaches can be used together / at the same time. But I do recommend creating a dummy DJ library to test what actually works for your workflow. It’s not always clear what really works as metadata and what really works as a playlist until you’re standing in front of a crowd trying to find a track.
Michael, thank you. I’ll play with the Metadata and see if that’ll work for me. Most of the time, I will be playing from much smaller playlists, which will be a summary of my massive folders. I am familiar with tagging software like tag and rename so that will be helpful for mass tagging if I need to.
Do you happen to know if I drag all of my songs into one playlist just to use as a search area in “an emergency”, is 60,000 songs too much for a playlist? This way, I will always be able to search everything and not miss anything. Will this be too cumbersome for the system resources to handle? What do you think? I love the software, however, the ease of searching that I am used to from other programs is the only issue I seem to be having right now. I’m just trying to find the best workaround. Thanks again for your input. I truly appreciate it.
Hi i have my Djay Pro istalled both on my dektop Mac mini and my Laptop Macbook Air. Evertyhing works smooth with exception for searching “My Files” on the Laptop. It just doesn´t find any of the same songs that i kan search and find on the desktop. Is there some settings that I´m missing?
The search and file management system in djay pro is a headache.
They made it unnecessarily complex. The solution should be the same as the competing software: use a tree-like folder browser on the left and the list of those files on the right. Be able to do quick searches in the entire database by just entering a word and pressing ENTER. Be able to list subfolders recursively without problems. The competing software has had all of this for years. In djay if you want to have something similar, you have to use itunes/music (or whatever it’s called), but you won’t be able to use your FLAC files. There is no compatibility. You’ll have to create folders and playlists manually. Any modification or deletion of files has to be done manually. This is totally impractical.
