Organising your music

[mattus123]

ahh ok, cheers guys

i might jump on the bandwagon

[lloydc]

smart play lists are my best friend in itunes.

I've set up play lists so that I never ever have to drag and drop songs into a play list, ever again.

For example I've got an 'electro' play list where every track that is 320kbps and has 'electro house' in the genre section of the ID3 tag, will automatically be put into that playlist.

The only hard thing I have to do is check the genre is correct when it gets added to itunes.

There are shit loads of criteria for smart play lists, so you can customise accordingly.

[intro]

Personally I'd rely on Traktor\Serato more for accurate BPM readings, but using Mixed In Key allows you to create itunes smart playlists based on BPM so you can import the playlist into other programs.

I have a range of R&B & Rap songs that i imported into traktor but it records the BPM at 200 or something ridiculous. Will mixed in key read the file the same or can i manually update the BPM?

[eggssell]

^intro, traktor tends to half or double a lot of hip hop tracks. or even totally spazzes out when it is a live hip hop crew, or even some of the mpc created tracks (like kanye and 9th wonder). becuase the drums are played/ tapped out by a human which is not always constant.

yes you can manually update the bpm in traktor.

the long way is to actually beat grid your tracks.

the short way is to just tap out the bpm externally (with a stop watch or the many available bpm apps on your idevice if you own one. i like the app BPM on an ipad. just a big ass button), and then type it over in the explorer section of traktor.

now im not 100% certain (sorry at work so cant check), but regardless of which method you use i think you need to then lock the track. i know i changed a lot of tracks manually in the explorer only to have them change once i next logon.

im not sure how much better mixed in key is with hip hop and r&B. maybe one of the holmies here who owns it can run a few tracks for you through it.

[eggssell]

a few beat grid tutes. ive never bothered so not sure how good they are. the second one is hip hop related

http://www.djtechtools.com/2008/04/09/q ... eat-grids/

http://www.djtechtools.com/2011/02/04/h ... n-traktor/

[imadje]

ok, so thread too long, didnt read all of it.. but my 2c:

Import everything to itunes. Itch does sync with itunes so set up playlists in itunes then you can access them through itch. I'm pretty sure you do use itch not serato dont you?

In itunes I sort everything into genres such as: dance, rock, soul/funk, hiphop/beats, etc

Then I sort sub playlists such as: house deep, house electro, house old skool, note I put the word house at the front so they all showup in a row when itunes sorts playlists alphabetically.

In itunes I have columns as follows: track name, bpm, time, comments, artist.

In the comments bar I enter all kinds of info such as my interpretation of the "feel" of a tune, if there are any instances of a tempo change, if there are really good breaks which I may want to set to a loop before i start playing, plus if there are any other songs that I know mix well with this song. This way if i search itunes for a song any other song I know mixes well with it will also be shown as an option.

Regarding bpm: I let itch analyse, it writes to the id3 tag, then in itunes I have to bring up the song info and at that point it recognises the tag written by itch and so adds the bpm to the itunes display too. As eggs said no bpm calculators are 100% reliable. Itch has a tap button to reset the tempo of a tune if it has been analysed wrong.

Finally I sort playlists I like, usually by exporting the history from itch of what I actually played at a good gig. I move this back to itunes and resort/fine tune anything then it is visible in itch again for practise.

Recently I have also started using itch crates. the sub crate system is dope. But i would rec you use itunes 1st and copy whole lists to itch crates from your itunes library to get started with.

[Gandy]

As eggs said no bpm calculators are 100% reliable.

keep in mind although the bpm analysers are pretty accurate these days, its still not 100% accurate,

[Cupe]

[imadje]

^

ok, so thread too long, didnt read all of it..

my bad gandy, big sorry love x

[MelodyIlliterate]

Thanks heaps guys. And yeah I do use itch at the moment. Will definitely play around with the iTunes method since I'm already using it religiously. So you can manually add criteria into your view panes like

Bpm and all that huh ? I generally download off dj city, would it already have that criteria saved into the track ? Cheers gents

[eggssell]

no bpm calculators are 100% reliable.

Wait. How did you know i was gonna say that imajor?

Haha What da hell i wasnt even ontopic i was just answering intro's queries.

[imadje]

^ lol, what a can of worms!

i was achaly alluding to you (eggs) mentioning bpm counters sometimes getting things doubled or halved by accident. Hadnt even noticed Gandys post, and def wasnt seeing the future.

I keep my jedi skills to the real world blud

now back on topic:

yer melody you can do "inline" editing on itunes by clicking on the browser. It can be a pain coz if you click 1mm to the left or right you end up playing the song from the start instead of editing. Another method is to highlight to track then press ctrl and I or cmd and I on mac. this brings up all the info for the track. I dont know if this actually edits the ID3 tag or just the info itunes shows.

TBH if itch has analysed your track then go to view its info in itunes (cmd or ctrl I) and it should automatically fill in the bpm reading with whatever Itch calculated. you only need to change it if itch got it wrong. I use the inline editing for the comments field much more.

[Mitch]

Melody, the tracks you have off Djcity will have the Title, Artist and BPM tags filled in. However i've found a few of the BPM tags were wrong.

I use the cmd+I and it brings up the get info window and edit everything from in there. And yes, this does edit the tags.

[MelodyIlliterate]

Thanks for the help gents... going to be a steep learning curve... and kudos to Mitch for explaining all the in key mixing in idiots details... Legend!