Music Management
How I keep a DJ library in a state where I can actually use it.
A track has two halves. There is what it is - title, artist, label, key, tempo - which a shop or a metadata provider can tell me. And there is what it does in a set, which nothing can look up, and which is the half that decides whether I play it. This is the system I use for the second half, and what falls out of it once every track is described the same way.
This is not a product. It is how I keep a DJ library in a state where I can actually ask it questions - built up over a lot of evenings of not being able to find the track I wanted. Six rules do most of the work.
- 1Describe what a track does, not just what it isTitle, artist and tempo tell me nothing about whether a track opens a night or ends it. The useful description is the one I have to make myself.
- 2Keep the description in the fileWritten into the audio itself, it survives moving machines, changing software and my own bad backups. In an app, it lives exactly as long as the app does.
- 3Let the folder name the genreA folder called "Hard Trance" already says it is Trance. Deriving that rather than maintaining a list means a new folder can never be forgotten about.
- 4Playlists are rules, not filingIf a playlist is something I drag tracks into, it is out of date the moment I stop. If it is a rule over the tags, it is never out of date.
- 5Cue every track the same wayEight pads that always mean the same eight things. Mid-set is the wrong moment to be reading a waveform.
- 6Nothing gets deletedAnything destructive shows me what it would change first, and duplicates get parked in a holding folder rather than removed.