Rocking a long-form post about this because there is very little guidance online. Read on for a deep dive into the software side of my DJ setup!

Note: If you already have a large library that is organized differently than what I’m suggesting here, it is hard but not impossible to fix the organization without screwing up your existing crates / playlists. More on that at the end of the article.

Okay - if you are a DJ and you are looking for a concrete set of rules for organizing your music, here you go.

1. Separate DJing from listening / streaming: keep your DJ tracks in a folder that is separate from iTunes or any other app that has two-way cloud syncing as a feature.

The only way to guarantee the integrity of your tracks is to keep them somewhere that only you and your DJ software are using. In my general “Music” folder, I have a folder called “DJDB”. All of my DJ tracks live in the “DJDB” folder. When I buy tracks from Apple, I copy them into the “DJDB” folder so that I can use them without having to worry about iTunes doing anything weird to the file.

2. Track file naming: regardless of the filenames of your tracks when you download them, rename your tracks to “[artist] - [track name]” before you import them.

“Track name” here should include meta-notes like “(Radio Edit)” or “(Extended Mix)”. If you rename your tracks this way, then 99.99% of the time, you’ll know immediately if you have a duplicate file situation. The only likely exception is if an artists releases songs on two different albums with the same song name. In that case, add a meta-note like “([album name] version)” to the title to avoid the duplicate name problem.

Extra credit - special characters (like å, ö, etc.) are not well supported in older filesystems. It is safer, but probably overkill, to replace special characters in filenames with their nearest ASCII equivalent.

Now, on its own, this may seem like an arbitrary rule, but it makes more sense when you combine it with rule 3.

3. Keep all of your tracks in one (1) folder

I actually do a slight variation on this. In my “DJDB” folder I have two sub-folders: “Tracks” and “Samples”. The “Tracks” folder contains all of the full length songs that I use in my DJ apps. The “Samples” folder contains loops and samples that I use for scratching and DJ IDs. Here are the main reasons for the “single folder” approach:

  • Because all of my music tracks are in one folder, I will immediately know I have a duplicate file when I try to copy a new file into the folder (because I am following rule 2)

  • If I need to copy my tracks between computers (which I do often, because I always bring a fully mirrored, ready-to-go spare laptop to all of my gigs), the flat directory structure makes the sync faster

  • Related: if my backup laptop has a different OS (Windows vs MacOS) than my main laptop, my DJ software on the spare laptop will have to “re-find” tracks in order to use them. This process is also much faster out of a single, flat directory.

4. Audio file formats: aiff, mp3, m4a

When picking up new tracks, I recommended sticking with these three file formats, with caveats:

  • AIFF: this is a “CD-quality” lossless format like WAV, but unlike WAV, the files can have metadata like an MP3 does - so it can have title, artist, and DJ-specific info like cue points baked into the file itself. If you are a purist who only wants lossless audio, AIFF is widely supported by DJ gear while OGG and FLAC (which also support metadata) are not. Warning: it is hard to guarantee that the track you want was ever at “CD-quality” to begin with. A bad recording that is converted to AIFF will still be bad. Also - lossless audio files are enormous compared to the other formats here.

  • MP3: MP3 files vary widely in terms of sound quality. The critical factor is the “bit rate”. To understand bit rate in an MP3, imagine one frame of a movie. A low bit rate (say, 64kbps) would equate to a movie frame that is very pixellated and unclear. A high bit rate (say, 320kbps) results in a frame that looks like a high-quality still photo. When you buy or make MP3s for DJing, do not go for less than 320kbps. At this level, for most purposes, they will be indistinguishable from “CD-quality” lossless files.

  • M4A: If you buy non-lossless music tracks from Apple, you are buying them in this format. The average bit depth for Apple’s M4A files is 256kbps, which is in the same ball park as high-quality MP3s. For almost all DJing purposes, you would never be able to distinguish a 256kbps M4A from a CD.
 For economic reasons, I prefer MP3s to M4As - because I get music cheaper through DJ pools, and high-quality MP3s are the standard for DJ pools these days.

How did I move from my current music management to this one?

I’ve been DJing regularly for five years now. For most of that time, I was following rules 1 and 4, but not 2 and 3. As a result, I had a music collection that was organized into a complicated directory tree and I had a pretty significant number of duplicate files. The hardest part about fixing my setup was that in my DJ software, I had hundreds of playlists (“crates”) all pointing to the tracks in their current locations.

“Flattening” the directories alone would not have been a huge problem. If I had done that there would have been a number of collisions (imagine how many albums start with a track called “01 Intro.mp3”). But collisions aside, the software would have found the file names and mostly successfully updated playlists on its own.

However, fixing the naming of my tracks was going to make it impossible for my DJ software to re-find songs for a given playlist. To solve this, I ended up writing some computer programs (specifically, some ruby scripts) to handle the flattening + renaming and to keep track of the mapping between old file names (“[artist] / [album] / [track number] [track title].foo”) and new ones ( “[artist] - [track title].foo”)

Once that was done, I exported all of my crates as m3u8 playlists and wrote another ruby script to recreate the m3u8 files with the file paths pointing to the new locations.

Next it was:

  1. Hide “old” DJ directories and music software directories
  2. Fire up DJ software and have it add the new “DJDB” file path from a blank slate
  3. Import the updated m3u8 files into the software to re-create my crates

The MVP app here, aside from my own scripts, was Lexicon. Rekordbox will happily export crates to m3u8 playlists, but Serato will not. So I used Lexicon for that and it was flawless.

Conclusion

If this is your first day DJing and you are just getting set up, then first off - rock on! And second off - I hope this sets you up for success and you don’t have to do what I did to fix five years of sketchy music management.

If, like me, you’ve been at it for a while, then I would say: 1) it’s not the end of the world to ignore all of my advice and keep on keeping on, but 2) if you do want to make these changes, it’s not impossible and tools like Lexicon make it much easier.

Given that I plan to keep DJing for a long time, I think that this is a better way to organize my music that will serve me in the long run. I hope it is helpful for you, too!