How to Organize Your DJ Library Like a Boss

Organizing your DJ library is crucial if you want to be able to reliably curate a vibe. You could try flying by the seat of your pants, but a systemic approach to cataloguing your music is essential for an efficient, effortless experience when it comes to playing great sets. Let’s take a look at the tools and techniques at our disposal for organizing a DJ library.

Contents:

• Part 1: Track Preparation
  • Markup Tools
  • Tagging Tools
  • A Sample Workflow for Markup and Tagging
• Part 2: Playlisting
  • Playlists
  • Intelligent Playlists
  • Advanced Intelligent Playlists
    • Special Case: Eligibility Playlists
• Part 3: Track Selection Using Tags, Playlists, and Other Tools

Part 1: Track Preparation

A DJ’s library is always growing, and they can become unwieldy behemoths in a hurry. While I would advise taking care when adding new material to the hard drive, a new DJ who has yet to find their niche could be experimenting with quite a lot. And an event DJ needs to be prepared for all sorts of tastes and situations.

So how do you remember the ins and outs of such a huge amount of music? And how do you create a meaningful vibe out of the tons of tracks in your library that may or may not fit together? 

The answer: track prep and playlisting

I personally use Rekordbox both for library management and performance (as, I daresay, do a large chunk of you readers as well), so these methods could be directly applied to there. Serato, Traktor, and Engine will all have similar features, so these methods will translate, more or less, to those systems as well.

Why Prep Tracks?

Let’s be real – no matter how attuned you are to your niche, there is no way to remember key points and idiosyncrasies for all your music. There’s just too much. Sure, if you’re experienced, you can feel out your tracks as they play and identify mix points on the fly. And that can work. But track prep takes the guesswork out of it, ups your workflow’s efficiency, and puts the mix more firmly under your control. 

And it really doesn’t take long – about thirty seconds per track, on average. A minute, tops. It really is that quick once you get a feel for the process. And it’s well worth the effort.

Track Preparation Tools

Track prep can be split into two phases: markup and tagging.

Markup involves analyzing tracks, correcting beatgrids, and inserting markers at key points throughout the track. Tagging involves thoughtfully labeling and categorizing the track.

Markup Tools

Let’s take a look at our tools for marking up tracks:

Analysis

This is easy because Rekordbox will automatically analyze all tracks upon import to collection by default. It’s usually pretty accurate, too. However, it is far from perfect. Always check your track analysis by locating a definitive downbeat on the 1. Kick in or first drop are safe bets, but beware of lead in notes!

Adjust your beatgrid so it properly lines up with the downbeats. It doesn’t have to be perfect (unless you like to use beatsync, which I do not recommend for several reasons), but it should be accurate enough for reliable track navigation.

Also, be aware of any tracks that employ tempo play, as this will completely mess up the analysis. You’ll have to turn quantize off to properly markup points past the tempo play. This is another in a long list of reasons to eschew the beatsync function.

Memory Cues

These are excellent for quickly finding your way around a track. First, check your preferences and tell Rekordbox to automatically add a memory cue at the beginning of a track. You may have to change it sometimes, but it often saves a second or two. Next, use beat jump to hop around the track and drop memory cues at key points, such as the introduction of key elements (kick in, bass in, hats in, etc) or the start of key sections, such as breakdowns or drops. Hint: For house and techno, these key points tend to occur at intervals of 4 or 8. Pay attention to measures 9, 17, 33, and 49!

You don’t really have to mark up the whole track. Personally, I markup my tracks to identify mix in points, so I generally deal with the first half of the track – and often just the first ⅓. However, marking outro points, such as when they pull the bass and start the outro, could be useful as well.

Hot Cues

These are excellent for quickly highlighting memory cues, though they can be used separately. I use hot cues to identify what I call “all-in” points. This is when a track gets going at full tilt, and can usually be found at the first drop. Setting these points as hot cues allows me to quickly audition a track during a performance.

Sometimes, I’ll set more than one of these identifiers. This is helpful when a track ratchets up the intensity, or after a long breakdown. Multiple hot cues quickly communicate to me – without even having to load the track – that I have multiple options for entry into the track. Maybe I just played a long breakdown and I want to skip that part. Or maybe I want to keep the intensity up, so I start from the higher intensity drop. 

Hot cues are extremely valuable when used this way. Just be sure to use a specific color for this type of cue. That way, you can also use different colored hot cues to denote other specific moments, such as the start of vocals. Alternatively, you can also name memory cues. However, this requires you to be in export mode, and it makes you type on the keyboard. I don’t know about you, but the less I have to touch my laptop while I’m playing my music, the better it feels. 

Tagging Tools

Properly tagging your tracks is an essential part of organizing your DJ library because it allows our automated sorting tools, like intelligent playlists, to function effectively. Let’s look at our tagging tools.

Metadata

This data is written into your track’s audio file as ID3 metadata. Rekordbox can edit these fields easily. Simply decide which fields are important to you for track selection, and make sure Rekordbox displays those fields. For example, I regularly refer to track title, artist, label, album, and genre. So I make sure all these fields are filled out for as many tracks as possible. Rekordbox can sort by these fields, among others, but we will get to that later.

Color

Assigning your tracks a color helps with identifying the general vibe of a track. Colors often correlate heavily to genre, but I’m sure you’ve realized that there are many tracks that straddle the fence when it comes to genre. Colors help to more subtly categorize tracks. 

Also, there can be several sub-genres within a genre, or different vibes within a genre or subgenre. Colors can help differentiate these subtly different tracks from one another and group like tracks together. 

For example, in the genre Minimal / Deep Tech, you can have subgenres/vibes like atmospheric minimal, rominimal, minimal-leaning deep tech, tech house-leaning deep tech, and microhouse. Rather than changing the genre field for all these tracks, you can keep their general genre classification and can color-code these subgenres and vibes to tell them apart and for sorting.

Rating

This isn’t for identifying tracks you like – you’ll remember those. The rating field is best used to denote a track’s relative energy level within its own color. This allows you to further subdivide your library and better group like tracks. 

This is also where it gets a bit subjective. There are objective elements that correspond with energy levels – open vs. closed hats, for example – but it’s much more nuanced than that. Don’t be afraid to incorrectly assign an energy level – you can always easily change it. And the more you classify tracks this way, the more consistent your subjective energy ratings will be.

MyTags

This function is specific to Rekordbox; other systems may or may not have analogous functionality.

MyTag is purposely very open ended. It allows you to tag tracks with any descriptors you want. Want to identify trashy-sounding house music? How about sexy tracks with innuendos? Or maybe set starters or set enders? That last one’s a good one!

Rekordbox has a default list of categories and tags, but you can add, delete, or change any of them. For example, some categories I use are:

• Descriptors – I use words to try to categorize vibes I work with. Dark, atmospheric, sparse, dreamy, and trippy are examples of tags I use.
• Components – I pick out specific things in a track that contribute to track identity. Sub bass, melodic bass, acid, tribal percussion, irregular kick pattern, vocals (spoken), vocals (sung), guitar, and piano are examples of tags I use.
• Utility – These tags identify a function a track can serve. Set starter, set ender, exclude from eligibility, and tempo shifter are examples of tags I use.

Comments

This is a field you can use for any other little random thing you want to associate your track with. It could be absolutely anything for any reason. An important feature of this field is that it is included in the ID3 metadata for the track, so it can be read by any system with ID3 functionality. This makes the option to automatically write MyTags to comments appealing – it makes your MyTags available outside of Rekordbox.

A Sample Workflow for Processing New Tracks

Let’s walk through the process of prepping a brand new track.

1. Import to collection and have Rekordbox analyze the track.

Check the beatgrid and make corrections if necessary. The most common correction needed is establishing the first beat in a measure.

2. Drop memory cues on key spots in the track.

Common spots include kick in, bass in, hats in, first break, first drop. Some tracks may have idiosyncrasies you may want to note with additional memory cues. Don’t overdo these – you’ll confuse yourself.

You can navigate your track with a mouse or trackpad, but it’s faster and more tactile to use the beat jump function on your controller.

3. Drop colored hot cues at your “All-in” moments. Most tracks just need one or two.

You’ll often use these hot cues to audition tracks during a set, as well as to help navigate a mix. Additionally, you can drop different colored hot cues to mark other key information you’ll want immediate visual access to – such as when vocals start.

4. Color-code and rate the track according to vibe/subgenre and energy level.

Let the track play from your hot cue and listen. Choose a color according to the general vibe. Remember this color, because you will need to mark tracks with a similar vibe with the same color. These colors can often correspond to subgenres, but that is not a rule.

As the track plays, choose a relative energy level for it – one to five stars. Don’t compare it to tracks of other genres or colors. Compare it to other tracks of its own color.

5. Mark MyTags that make sense to you for this track.

Remember, you’re doing this for yourself. It helps if you have a set of tags established to choose from, but if you’re starting from scratch, choose descriptive words that capture how the track feels to you. There are no wrong tags – if you can hang a feeling on a word, it’s a good tag. Words like dreamy, trippy, dark, sunny, and atmospheric work well.

Identify other helpful elements and tag them as well. Marking set starters, set enders, and tempo shifters is a good idea.

Identify any outstanding elements. Tribal percussion, acid bass, and vocals (spoken or sung) are examples, but the sky’s the limit. Try not to get bogged down here – just tag major things that really stick out to you and that will help you group other tracks that may share that particular characteristic.

Conclusion for Track Preparation

This may seem like a lot of work, but it’s really a pretty quick process. At first, it will take longer. But if you keep it up, you’ll notice the patterns. You’ll spot memory cue points faster. You’ll even carry over your color and rating senses into your process for finding new tracks to buy. I’ve been doing it this way for a while now, and I process a new track, on average, in about 30 seconds – a minute if I have to sit and think about the tags for a moment.

If you’re just at the start of organizing your DJ library like this, perhaps cut the process down. Start with just markup and energy ratings or colors. Once you get the hang of that, introduce ratings and tagging. Remember, library management isn’t something you ever “finish,” so don’t think about it as a task to complete. It’s just something you do little by little over the span of your DJ career.

Part 2: Playlisting

Now that you have your tracks marked up and tagged, it’s time to organize them in a meaningful way. It won’t do you much good to have to dive through your whole collection to find anything. This is why we break down collections into smaller, more manageable groupings called playlists.

In Rekordbox, we have two types of playlists: normal playlists, and intelligent playlists. (Note: The other major DJ library management software have their own versions of this: Serato has smart crates, and Traktor and Engine have smartlists.)

Playlists

These are manual collections of tracks. They don’t update, they don’t track anything, they’re just what you drop into them. Your inclination may be to make playlists of your favorite tracks, or tracks you know fit well together, but there are more efficient ways to do that with intelligent playlists, comments or MyTags.

The best use of this type of “dumb” playlists is for picks. 

Picks are what you make when you’re preparing for a performance. You use all of the organizational tools available in Rekordbox – from intelligent playlists to related and matching tracks – to guide you to tracks that fit the bill for the type of show you want to play. 

Maybe you’re feeling edgy and moody; let the software guide you to dark, atmospheric tracks. Maybe you’re going to play poolside for your friends in the summertime; seek out uplifting, sunny sounding tracks. Rekordbox knows how to find what you’re looking for because you have already marked up and tagged all your tracks with meaningful metadata. Audition the ones that come up, pick the ones you like, and drop them in the playlist.

Another good use is tracking your sets. (This is an important step in making that handy eligible tracks playlist!) Rekordbox automatically documents every track you play – all the time, every time. So if you use Rekordbox for performance, you have access to this information.

1. Make a regular playlist titled with the date and situation of your show. 
2. Scroll down your explorer window to the History section and find the date of your performance and select it. Your set will display. It’s best to do this just after you finish, so it’s the latest playlist in your history.
3. Highlight all the tracks you played and drop them into your newly created playlist.

Finally, these are the playlists you want for truly custom selections – things you just can’t nail down with automation. The sky’s the limit here, so let your imagination run! The only downside is that if you want to update these playlists as you obtain new music, you would have to do it manually. Note that even in these cases, though, it is often possible to create an intelligent playlist to do the legwork for you.

Intelligent Playlists

Intelligent playlists are flexible and can create groupings for a wide variety of criteria. They also update automatically, so you can set and forget them.

Let’s make our first intelligent playlist:

1. Right click on the playlist window and select “Create intelligent playlist.”
2. Name the playlist the genre it will contain.
3. Set the playlist rule to say “Genre is [your genre].

Easy peasy. Now make an intelligent playlist for each genre to which you want quick access. I’ll wait.

Excellent. Now create a folder in your playlist tree labeled “By Genre” and drop all your genre-specific playlists into it. This lets you hide these playlists when you’re not using them (you’re going to have A LOT of playlists – better to start using folders at the beginning!)

If you can think of any other general criteria for broad, automatically-updating playlists that you would like to have, now is a good time to make them. For example, I also like to make broad playlists for my favorite labels. I have a playlist of all my original tracks. And because I play every week (underground stream is live on Twitch Wednesdays at 10PM CST), I have a playlist for my niche that automatically excludes tracks I’ve played in the previous four weeks. This is a little more involved, but it is extremely useful for a DJ that performs often.

Intelligent playlists allow you to combine several criteria to create a playlist. They are quite powerful and very useful, but they do have their limitations. That said, there are still plenty of creative ways we can employ intelligent playlists to meaningfully group tracks in our ever-expanding library of music. We will get to more advanced case uses – like played-track exclusion – towards the end of this article. (Click here to skip ahead to the eligibility playlist)

Advanced Intelligent Playlists

This is where intelligent playlists can shine, but also where their limitations really start to show. Rekordbox allows you to add multiple criteria for generating your playlist. You have the option to “Match all” or “Match any” of the criteria you give. And it allows you to define rules regarding all sorts of metadata. Let’s look at an example.

You’re going to play a house party and you want to put together a peak-hour tech house set. Here are some criteria you might use:

• Match all of the following
• Genre is tech house
• Rating is ≥ 4 stars
• Color is [whatever color you assign to your tech house bangers]
• MyTag contains [whatever MyTag you may use to denote peak hour tracks]

This playlist will effectively display only your hardest hitting peak hour tech house tracks. Feel free to pick from this playlist and drop them into your peak hour playlist for your set. You could just use this playlist, but depending on the size of your library, I still recommend making picks for the event.

Now, let’s look at another example, let’s say you want to play a techno set, but you want something other than that current Drumcode sound. You can explore your other options by setting the following criteria: 

• Match all of the following
• Genre is Techno
• Label is not Drumcode
• Comments does not include [any tag related to the sound you want to avoid]
  • Repeat this criterion for any additional tags you want to filter out.

Now, it’s worth talking about point four. Aside from being grammatically incorrect (this is just how Rekordbox lists its drop down menu options for setting criteria), you may note that I used comments rather than MyTag. This is due to a specific shortcoming in Rekordbox and the workaround for it. 

For some reason, when using intelligent playlists to filter MyTags by “does not contain,” the playlist will additionally exclude all tracks without at least one MyTag. The workaround here is to have Rekordbox automatically write all MyTags to comments (Preferences > Library > Browser > first option). MyTag isn’t ID3 metadata, but comments are – another reason this option is helpful. By having the criterion examine the comments rather than MyTag, you can sidestep the bug.

Additionally, there is a big limitation when it comes to setting criteria – there is no “and / or” on an individual basis. This means that you cannot set a playlist to be “tech house and techno” while matching other criteria. Instead, you have to set multiple “Genre is not [x genre].”( Or you can be creative and set “Genre contains tech” and “Genre is not Deep Tech.”) Seeing that you are limited to a maximum of 16 criteria, you can see how this simply cannot work in many instances. This is a big deal and a source of many gripes in the Rekordbox community. 

Eligibility Playlists

Finally, let’s look at the Eligibility playlist I talked about earlier. When I make my picks for my weekly show, I don’t like to repeat myself. I keep the replays up for a month (you can listen here on SoundCloud), and if I choose a show for the Underground Stream Podcast, it stays up for 90 days. My rule is I do not want to play a track that was used in a show that is currently available online. I created these special playlists so I don’t have to worry about repeating myself. This is how I do it:

Preparing the tracks:

• Set preferences to automatically write MyTag to Comments
• Create a MyTag that reads Exclude from Eligibility
• After a performance, create and label a playlist with the date, and copy the setlist from the HISTORY folder.
• Mark all tracks played in the show as Exclude from Eligibility

Creating the playlists:

• Create an intelligent playlist
• Set the following criteria
  • Genre is [your genre]
  • Comments does not include Exclude from Eligibility

This playlist will include all tracks in the genre that are not marked for exclusion. I also create eligibility sub-playlists that focus on specific vibes or subgenres I may want to play. They all include these two criteria. When a show comes offline, I simply find that show’s playlist, select all the tracks, and uncheck Exclude from Eligibility. Now those tracks will appear in the Eligibility lists again. It’s really a great system for keeping things fresh!

Part 3: Track Selection Using Tags and Playlists

Now that our tracks are prepared and our playlists are established, let’s look at a sample workflow for selecting tracks for a set. This is where organizing your DJ library makes a massive difference – it allows you to think of a vibe, and quickly hone in on the tracks that fit.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t make a point of using the eligibility workflow, but it is simple to integrate it into this process. Note that this process will be exponentially more effective the more of your tracks are meaningfully tagged with metadata, MyTags, colors, and ratings.

It’s also worth noting that while this process is easily doable on your laptop, it can be faster and more engaging to use hardware. So check out your controller or decks for their various track navigation and tagging functions.

Track Selection Process

1. Get the details of your situation
   1. Are you playing an event? If so, what type of event? 
   2. What type of music will the event call for? 
   3. What’s your timeslot and how will that affect your selections? Do you know who is playing before/after you? How will that affect your selections?
   4. How long are you expected to play?

These are the main considerations when it comes to getting an idea of where to start the selection process. A wedding will call for a starkly different selection than an underground warehouse party, and a music festival will call for a starkly different selection than an after-hours lounge.

Knowing your slot in the course of the event is also important. A promoter generally wants an upward momentum in energy throughout the course of the night, so your selections will be different depending on what time you are playing, and who you are playing between.

Finally, you need to know how long your set is going to be. There is nothing worse than running out of music, so you need more than enough without bringing your entire collection. We’ll get to determining that in a moment.

On the other hand, if you’re just recording a mix to post online or just playing for some friends at a get-together, you have the freedom to set these parameters yourself.

2. Determine how much material you need.
   1. Take your baseline (about how many songs you would play in the given timeframe) and double it. You can also add a handful more, for good measure.

The number of tracks over a given timeframe will vary according to genre and your style of play. It is best determined by playing normally for an hour, and counting the number of tracks you played.

As an example, I play about 22 – 25 tracks per show – which is an hour and a half long. So when I make selections, I make sure to pick about 50 – 60 tracks.

3. Determine your genre(s), vibe, and energy levels.
   1. Look at or create intelligent playlists to pull up suggestions from your collection according to what you have in mind.
   2. Use features such as “Related Tracks” to offer more suggestions. This works best when building “mini-mixes” of about 3 to 5 tracks that fit particularly well together.

This is where you determine the vibe and trajectory of your set. You don’t have to be too specific in creating your intelligent playlists. Remember, you are just looking for suggestions, so you don’t want to box yourself in off the bat. 

Sometimes, when you have found a track or two that embody the feeling you’re going for, it could help to use other suggestion tools such as “Related Tracks” to find more music that goes with that specific track. This way, you can build small sets of tracks around a centerpiece that could serve as a chunk of your mix – if you decide to use it in the moment. Everything can change once you’re up and running!

It’s also important to determine the energetic trajectory of your set and choose accordingly. This is where color and rating tags come in. Do you want a steady stream to maintain a mood or vibe? Stick with one color and the same star rating – maybe up or down one star. Do you want to ramp the energy up or down? Depending on how steep of a ramp you want, consider a range of star ratings among one – perhaps two – colors. The variety of colors and ratings will vary according to how much of an energy shift you want in your set. 

4. Make your picks

I find the easiest way to do this is with the tagged tracks playlist. This is a special, temporary playlist in Rekordbox that allows you to add tracks with a button press on your controller. Find a track you like? Press the button to add to the temporary playlist. Audition the next track.

Hot cues come in clutch here, because they speed up the process by allowing you to jump to a drop with a button push. This way you can quickly hear the track running at full tilt and decide whether it’s a fit.

When you have enough tracks in your temporary playlist, create a playlist for your event. Label it something like “Picks for [date / event].” Select all the tracks in your temporary playlist and drop them into your permanent playlist for the event.

5. Organize your picks (optional)

This step isn’t 100% necessary because Rekordbox can reorganize your playlist according to the metadata fields available, so you can reorganize your tracks by star rating or color on the fly with a click. If that’s organized enough for you, then you’re done! I skip this sometimes if I don’t allot enough time for prep.

However, there are advantages to manually organizing your picks. For example, I like to pick a track for a set starter. I’ll move that track to be first on the list. From there, you can group any “mini-mixes” you thought up together. And you can also organize your playlist to move from one to five stars in one color to one to five stars in another color. This means a little less jumping around while you’re making selections mid-set.

Like I said, this step isn’t necessary, but some may find it helpful. It’s best to try it out one day and see if it’s worth the extra time and effort for you.

Conclusion for Playlisting and Track Selection

Track selection is the core of what a DJ does. We are curators of sound and vibe. So don’t just drop the latest Toolroom compilation on a thumb drive and call it a day – be choosy with your music. Take the time to really tag and organize your DJ library. You don’t  have to get it done in a day. Or a week. Or even a year. But a little bit every day adds up fast. 

And when you go to make your picks, think about what you want to project. Make your selections carefully and with purpose. It may be their trip, but they chose you to drive the bus. Take them somewhere worthwhile.

Until next time, 
AudioMunk