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It kind of depends where you plan on playing but if you can have everything as wav (or flac) that would be best. A lot is made of the difference between mp3 and and lossless but tbh if the mp3 is 320kbps most people can't tell the difference and I found that it's only in a club with a big soundsystem that you can can hear the difference and even then its most noticeable when you mix from a wav to an mp3.
With naming conventions I always did artist first then track name as I never remember track names but always remembered songs by the producer, I don't think there's a right or wrong but I put an underscore instead of the spaces in the name (artist_track_name) as this usually makes it easier for different systems to read files without adding weird symbols (it's not likely but I remember copying files from mac to PC and things got scrambled)
How you organise things is the most important, do you group by BPM/Key etc that's just going to be a bit of trial and error to see what works for you, what I would advise is that if you play out you take a record bags worth of tracks (no more that 50) on a USB stick to make it easier to play a set, if you've got thousands of tracks sometimes you can get paralysed buy too much choice or just lose flow in a mix by being too all over the place.
Anyway I haven't DJ'ed in years so feel free to ignore everything I say :)
Gewürzt-
All good tips. I’m especially keen to avoid being paralysed! That’s what I found really difficult about DJing with streaming. I found that I’d have a few tracks in mind, but quickly run out of direction and end up stopping.
With vinyl I have my own system with is a sort of blend of year/label (think I might find a way to include label in file name if it doesn’t get too unwieldy, or the Denon software’s metadata doesn’t make it easy to quickly look at labels). When I do a mix, I tend to flick through and pull out anything that might go into the mix I have in mind, then dry running here and there to figure out the final set list. I think I need to go about digital sets similarly with playlists.
I’ve heard FLAC mentioned as a favoured file format in lots of places. I’m not quite sure why, but I have this sense of it being a bit esoteric. I’ve never made a FLAC file in my life, but creating WAVs seems like overkill.
Does a better PC rip CDs faster? Or is that a pretty standard procedure? I pulled out everything I need to work through and hopefully can do an hour hear and there while also messing about with the Prime GO, which has arrived already. Will need to wait until after kiddy bedtime to play with it, though.
J0nathan
Just to continue killing this thread, I got a good Black Friday deal on the Prime GO, so should be up and running on that in a few days.
Anyone have general tips on managing a digital library? File type, settings, naming conventions etc?