![\"A](\"https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/215277/2026/hela-kartan-ngbg2026.jpg\")
Thanks as always to my mailing list subscribers! If you aren’t a subscriber yet, sign up here!
\nStory time! We made a trip to the US around Christmas and when we came back, I joined a DJ class that was being offered here in Malmö. My goal in signing up was to potentially meet other DJs to collaborate with, and that worked out pretty well! One of the other students, DJ Maxxio, invited me to DJ with him at a series of events at a beach bar in Lomma, which is a short ride from Malmö. And the teacher of the program, Fatmire, offered me a spot during Malmö’s hugely popular (and somewhat notorious) NGBG music festival.
\nNorra Grängesbergsgatan - or just NGBG - is a neighborhood in the city with extremely relaxed noise ordinances. There are an enormous number of music practice spaces for rent there, along with my favorite club in the city - Plan B. For ten years now, organizers have put on a massive annual music festival here. It keeps getting bigger and crazier every year, and this year, nearby residents have had enough. So this is going to be the last NGBG festival.
\n
Per the map above, there are 50 total performance spaces, with acts lined up all of Friday night and most of Saturday at all of them. It’s going to be bonkers. For my set, I’ve put together the most club-oriented set I’ve ever done - but I also feel like I found something that I had forgotten about, that I didn’t realize I was missing…
\nAfter NGBG, I will have a little more free time on my hands - and no fewer than three sets ready to be live-streamed. So, stay tuned here and on IG later this month for some new Malmö Sessions!
\nCheers,\nHarrison
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-02T19:27:47+02:00", "url": "https://harrisonripps.com/2026/09/02/eight-crazy-months.html", "tags": ["Newsletter"] }, { "id": "http://djharrisonripps.micro.blog/2025/12/16/this-friday-december-th-malm.html", "title": "This Friday, December 19th: MALMÖ SESSIONS 002", "content_html": "Thanks as always to my mailing list subscribers! If you aren’t a subscriber yet, sign up here!
\nThe last few months we have been settling in to life in Sweden. I’ve always liked city living, and Malmö has really delivered: walkable, amazing bike-friendly infrastructure, great public transportation.
\nAs winter has found its way here, it has gotten much darker. Seven hours of daytime - and direct sunshine is not guaranteed! This has got to be part of the motivation behind the Swedish concept of myssig - the coziness that we are inspired to make for ourselves when the sun is so scarce.
\nThe contrast of cozy and cold has found its way into my latest livestream as well.
\n![\"A](\"https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/215277/2025/malmo-sessions-002.png\")
This is a slow-tempo mix where I play with mixing chill and dynamic tracks to make an evolving winter vibe. It’s a little brooding, a little silly - I hope you dig it!
\nAs with Malmö Sessions 001, I am going to spin at 11pm Sweden time on Friday, to align with a 5pm cocktail hour in the US:
\nThere’ll be one or two sound check tracks and then we’ll slide into the mix. Looking forward to spending a chill Friday evening with you, and thanks again for tuning in!
\nCheers,
\nHarrison
Thanks as always to my mailing list subscribers! If you aren’t a subscriber yet, sign up here!
\nMy last livestream was in April, and then things got crazy:
\n…and oh yeah, I moved to another country.
\nI’ve been living in Malmö, Sweden since August 1st, and the experience has been amazing! I started working on a new set shortly after I moved, but it has been a little hectic getting up and running in a new country. Well, no matter, friends: the work is DONE!
\n![\"Auto-generated](\"https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/215277/2025/image.png\")
Five years was a good run for the QUARANTINE DANCE MIX and TOTALLY NORMAL DANCE mix eras. I’m marking this next bit of time with the new studio location, and so, we’re off to the races with MALMÖ SESSIONS.
\nThis first set is a little further from mainstream tracks than I’ve gone in the past, and I had to get creative with mixing due to the limitations of my current DJ controller. I’ve pulled in a few tracks from earlier this year that absolutely deserved another play, along with a lot of new tracks from my wandering around music festivals and local clubs over the past few months.
\nTo make the livestream work for long-time listeners, I am going to spin at 11pm Sweden time on Friday, which perfectly aligns with a 5pm cocktail hour in the US. So you heard it here:
\nAlso! I’m going to keep the sound check short, 1 or 2 tracks, before I dive in to the mix.
\nI hope you dig it, and thanks again for tuning in!
\nCheers,\nHarrison
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-20T14:59:29+02:00", "url": "https://harrisonripps.com/2025/10/20/this-friday-october-th-malm.html", "tags": ["Newsletter"] }, { "id": "http://djharrisonripps.micro.blog/2025/04/07/this-friday-april-th-five.html", "title": "This Friday, April 11th: Five YEARS of livestreams!", "content_html": "![\"DJ](\"https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/215277/2025/harrison-rippsname-logo-and-record-white-50pct.png\"){kind=logo}
Hey there - thank you as always for subscribing to the mailing list!
\nI’m deviating from the format of my usual livestream announcements to let y’all know about some changes I’ve made:
\nI’m no longer using mailchimp for these announcements. If you still want to get email announcements for my livestreams, please sign up here! And please spread the word because I lost email addresses for some mail subscribers in the transition.
\nAs much as I genuinely loved the Zoom hangouts, Zoom was asking way too much for me to renew. I’m open to other options for a side-channel hangout stream during my sets; you can reply directly to this email to share your ideas!
\nMixcloud has been pretty dependable, but not awesome for engagement. So I’m moving livestreams to Twitch, and moving my set recordings to Soundcloud.
\nOkay, now without further ado, let’s talk about what’s shakin’ this Friday!
\n![\"Flyer](\"https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/215277/2025/tndm-5-years-1.png\")
It’s hard to believe that I started this project five years ago as an antidote against going insane. The jury is still out on whether or not it worked, but if I am insane, I appear to be in good company these days 😅
\nThis month’s set is a mix of new tracks and some bangers that I’ve played before. But most importantly, I will be playing it on my new setup! Without a computer! (Except, you know, for the live-streaming part)
\nSo thanks as always for tuning in, please resubscribe to get future updates, and let’s kick it this Friday night!
\nCheers,
\nHarrison
Rocking a long-form post about this because there is very little guidance online.\nRead on for a deep dive into the software side of my DJ setup!
\n\n\nNote: 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.
\n
Okay - if you are a DJ and you are looking for a concrete set of rules for organizing your music, here you go.
\nThe 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.
\n“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.
\nExtra 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.
\nNow, on its own, this may seem like an arbitrary rule, but it makes more sense when you combine it with rule 3.
\nI 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:
\nWhen picking up new tracks, I recommended sticking with these three file formats, with caveats:
\nI’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.
\n“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.
\nHowever, 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”)
\nOnce 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.
\nNext it was:
\nThe 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.
\nIf 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.
\nIf, 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.
\nGiven 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!
", "date_published": "2025-03-30T16:50:11+02:00", "url": "https://harrisonripps.com/2025/03/30/dj-music-management-best-practices.html", "tags": ["Newsletter"] } ] }