I see a lot of great comments already. A lot of the things will be in the next video's!

Sun....your channel is the BIZ!!!!!!!.....I ALWAYS brought my externals....only advantage for me is I'm 50 yo and been in the music field since about 14.....but this has me thinking in a whole different direction..... Thank You So Much......i am that guy who LOVES the b-sides....and revealing them to the dance floor....so you let me know i am not alone in my thought process.....salute

Yeah, expect a couple more video's about this subject because I have so much more to say about it! :)

djTLMtv Thanks for finally addressing this issue. I know it is a tough one. I, like you and no doubt many others, have probably re-organized my music a thousand times. For the longest, it was by artist and then by album. That worked for my personal listening and enjoyment, but as a DJ, it is really hard to find what I want when I want it. So I tried dumping all my music into the root music folder....bad idea. This made sorting and selecting even more difficult and slowed down my database in VDJ. (Even the software couldn't keep up). So what I've recently begun doing is separating the tracks into groups by tempo/genre; i.e. dance, mellow/groove, Hip Hop and so on. Then I segregate them by decade. This has helped me immensely for my practice sessions. As it is now, I only have been doing birthday parties and the like, so this helps me pull the music I think will be appropriate for the function into a virtual folder and I freestyle from there. After the gig, I just delete the folder, but the music stays in the original folders. I hope this helps someone.

I cannot wait for your other vids on this topic. This helped my a whole lot. I hate to say that I am guilty of carrying hundreds of Gigs on my external hard drive. What I am thinking is to have my crates that you have used as examples in my internal hard drive but still have my external on hand just in case. I have found myself playing this year a wide range of music from different decades. So me to be a lot more organize will help me a whole because I to like to consider myself a "freestyle" DJ but at times I feel overwhelmed due to the fact that I am reviewing thousands of songs and need to locate my "sure shoot" songs.

I'm late to the party here, but my tip is to start rocking smart crates. I have my music organised on my laptop's actual folder structure, the same way i want them in serrate, e.g. funk, soul, breaks, golden era hiphop etc. However, if you create 3 smart crates called: "funk breaks", "bboy breaks" and "chilled breaks", you can for a single song, put in the comment "funk break, bboy break, chill break" and have rules such that that SAME song appears in all three crates. The problem with music is that genres blend easily and you can't say that a "bboy break" song won't necessarily fit the night when you need chilled breaks (e.g. warmup). Therefore, use the metadata for your music collection, and use smart crates to filter out by your criteria, e.g. "warmup" "bangers" etc., then just apply the correct tags against your music file, and you're good to go.

Amazing topics and great feedback in the comments. I'm learning so much from you Channel DJ TLM. I appreciate you takeing out time to teach us. Your information is priceless! I am just beginning to dj,On a more serious tip. I have done parties for friends family Etc over the years. I just had my first gig 2 weeks ago. It was a wedding reception with a lot of mixed genres. African Americans, caucasians, Latinos and Mexicans. So it really stretched me. The good thing about this being that I'm just starting and I don't have many gigs yet. It gives me time now to really organize my crates, and be prepared for when the gigs start coming. I'm a singer-songwriter. And having a wife and six kids I had to put a lot of those things on the back burner. So being a DJ gives me a chance to really do what I'm passionate about in a different way. It's still performing LOL

I use itunes. i have one playlist folder with all my music organize in genre (acapella,instrumentals,merengue,etc) then i have a whole separate folder for just Djing. I organize by genre again but this time i make sure the songs im adding are songs i play every gig and that are cued, warped, extended and ready to play when i dj so i dont waste time when performing... In that itunes folder i also have banger folder that is pretty much my cheat cheat if i see the need of uplifting the crowd, i have to look no further . A tip i have is to not go over 50 songs in each dj folder, most likely you wont even use half of those songs.

It is hard for West Indian dj's especially when you have hundreds of riddims just for dancehall, not to mention reggae and soca. What I do is pick out the bangers and the songs that people generally like and try to put them in separate crates and sub crates by year. For ex. Soca>classics>90's>2000-2010 hits>2011-14 hits>2015 I also freestyle mostly so I like having ALL of my music analyzed, tagged, and ready to go with cues. This way as soon as I think of a track to play I can do it very easily. Generally the crates are there for when I'm stuck.

NICE! alot of dj's have this problem with the types of software out there. it helps when you know your laptop and sofeware. I went to a party and the dj was lost in his laptop. He was looking for songs to play. He was' nt organized. When your crates are organized. You play with alot more confidence. There is no right way to organize music. Bottom line is, when you need a song you try to make it as easy as possible to find it. Happy Newyear. To my fellow dj's.

For me since this pandemic, I started to reorganize my crates. what I do is I do genre, then type of tempo so club or just regular then I do years, then I do BPMs. It definitely has been taking forever, but it has been a big help for me

I like using the tabs. Comments, bpm, key. Mostly find myself using the date added tab to find the most recently added tracks at top. I even use emojis in my song names just to make the hits more visual🔥. I play a lot of genres and need a lot of music because I play on a weekly basis and don't want to keep playing the same every week.

I use the #hashtag method in the comments section. This allows me to build playlists on the fly. I also use iTunes to build my playlist, some of them being smart playlists with live updates. 5 star tracks with #Party added within the past 90 days, for example would be my new tracks. ... To help organize all this I use Doug iTunes Scripts to edit multiple track ID3 tag fields. In this example I can search all of Snoop Dogg and mark them all #WestCoast. I keep an excel spreadsheet of all my tags to make sure they are consistent. It's a lot of work and only effective as your preparation.

Love this topic. It's easy to have 10k plus tracks on your laptop but organisation is very important to me. Yes, I use "crates", crates are made up genres and time periods for example I would have 90's hip hop in a crates and 2014 Deep house in a different. Some crates are bigger but generally they are manageable. I play only from the crates when I DJ unless someone requests I tracks I have but it's not a in crate. Looking forward to the other videos on this interesting topic.

That's a quite important topic, and I thank you for sharing your own idea of it djTLM ! ... Well I would say that for my part, I try to anticipate as much as I can each show in taking as much as I can of information about the audience (I know it's hard) but at the end the deal always remains to make the crowd dance... So if I have that information in advance, then I can prepare some "personalized crates" for the show I will play with tracks that (I think) could fit better the crowd...

the most helpful video ever! there's seriously not that much vids on this topic and thank you so much for it!

So I'm a DJ who's quality is to play Songs from any Genre; from oldschool to drum and base so I always got Folders with the best songs from every Genre and after the warm up from an other DJ or by myself I start to play some Songs from the "Best-List" from every Genre to figure out what the Crowd like the most. This is not easy to mix but the thing but that what makes me different from others at privat partys. When I have got the Genre which gets best by the people I get to a Folder special Folder for this Genre and play songs from there but also put some Tracks from the "Best-Lists" in my Mix. Sry for my bad eglish ;(

Thanks a lot for your videos. They are really helpful. Just a couple a days ago I was looking for a good video to prepare my music. It was perfect timed that you just postet this video and it helped me a lot. I had my first gig yesterday and the barowner was really happy with my work. Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge it did help me a lot. Happy New year 🎆🎆

Great topic. I thought I was the only one with this issue. We need 2nd part or more on this topic. Thanks everybody

This my help some of you. My crates are organized in this order: 1. Genre 2. Clean vs Dirty 3. By Year I do make a playlist and create a crate with that before my gigs depending on event but I don't play it track for track. I freestyle my sets. For example if I do a west coast set I'll pregame a lot of west coast tracks just for easy access because you don't wanna be searching for these once the gig starts.

I started using pioneers rekordbox which has helped me out a lot.. I pick out the most commonly played songs and add new stuff remove stuff that no longer works or was popular 12 months ago but is long forgotten to a main playlist think I'm working with 1,000 or more songs but tend to do a clear out now and then.. the beauty of rekordbox is it organises all the songs within the playlist into folders bpm, title, artist..... whatever.. so when I play a song I can look at the bpm and pick another song around the same bpm maybe look in a folder -/+2 bpm. When I was mainly working from cds I had a few good ones which saw me through the night. In a way I miss picking up say a disco hits cd and reading the back of the box and finding good suggestions. If you can organise your crates in the same way you can't go far wrong. Have a group of say 20-30 songs in each playlist which will work. Say have a playlist for each genre.. great for moving through different styles of music.

I organize mine by genre and year for up to 5 years "2009 thru 2014" Hip Hop/R&B/Pop. Then I have a warm-up crates which contains a mix of all genres. Then I have Crate labeled HITS, Funk/Soul, House and then a crate for Jersey Club Music

Here's my method of organizing crates (folders), although I'm an old school (vinyl) Dj who is new to Serato. ...My folders are labeled "Hip hop", R&B, Rock, Uptempo Club, House, jazz, Acapellas, Instrumentals, etc etc etc... but WITHIN those folders I have sub-crates organized by DECADE (hip hop 80's, hip hop 90's, hip hop 2000's, etc) and this is how I enter them in "Genre" as well. Because each decade has hundreds of songs in them, I might create a playlist for "Saturday night" or "Club Blah" for my next gig with a combination of a bunch of different sub genres. This way I can have a nice variety of different stuff tailored for my next gig as a starting reference. Like you, I don't have any particular order because I like to come off the top, but I do have some favorites for that night in one list, but this list is always changing while my other folders are neatly organized. I very much enjoy your videos and I recommend your channel to all my friends.. Thanks!!!

Hey my name is Ronald from Trinidad , just wa na sy that ur viceos are really good u take ur time to pass on ur knowledge and experience so that we can understand . I too am a dj like it alot ,taught myself just like u, keep it up bro .

Brother DJ TLM, we are stil waiting for the follow-up vids regarding the topic of building crates. I understand that you nay have been busy lately or still procrastinating with this subject(just a little pun) but at least I would like to hear more of your opinion. Yes I recognize that it's been over two years ago when you uploaded this first video but I've just recently discovered your channel, I enjoy how you construct the vids and how you are direct in your words(no bs). Besides with your videos the background music doesn't overpower your commentary(much props). Much respect from the StL!

Great Vid dj tlm, thanks for the info! For me, I'm a progressive House and EDM dj, i always analyse my music with "Mixed In The Key", then open Traktor and sort my music By key, because i always want my music to be in key, so i can make a seemless and smooth transition. I just started to play freestyle like u tlm, all my music are organized in key so i have no problem when picking the next song, sometimes i organize the First 5 tracks so i make sure i start hard! (When headlinning of course)

Great ideas difficulty going to start working on my crates more!!

Once again TLM you, hit the nail on the head!

Hey TLM, we need that part 2 for real! This is so essential for us digital DJs!

Thank you for this video , I've been asking my buddy's as well on this im glad you touched this subject

Good topic bro and i agree its a very hard topic to discuss,so i truly understand the delay. Lets see if i can shine a little light on this subject...well this is just what works for me. Try it out you may or may not like it. Now to start im what i like to call a "Hot Cut" DJ. Meaning i only play fragments of songs and lyrics. So with that being said now FOR ME and average gig for me is about 3/4 hours im not world known of super popular im just your bed room, birthday, wedding, back yard DJ. Nobody special lol but my creat go like this warm up, peak, cool down. Now for which ever creat im putting music in contains what ever song i feel applies to that creat. Rather it be hip hop, dico, edm, ect. This work for me cause im only using small parts of the music. My music changes according to the gig but the recipe is the same. Now my warm up bmp range between 80/100, peak 120/140, cool down 100/75. I keep at least 2 hrs. Music in each creat.(now with the way i spin i can get at max. About 8-10mins out each track) Hope this helped. Shout to my dude DJ TLM!

Hi, im a hiphop and rnb dj from germany. I have music from any genre too, but for the main part is hiphop and rnb. For easiest way for me was to create a warmup folder. In this folder i have songs which are not really new but not to old too like oldschool. For example I use songs like what u say from jason derulo. Thats for the warm up. Then i have my folder with new songs but still rnb or " chill black music" . One of the most important folders is ladies tunes. This are songs from beyonce...

Man you are hitting the bullseye with these videos, especially the last one with MS Surface. I've also had problems with organizing my music and lots of people recommended using iTunes playlists. They are supposed to be very easy to use and Traktor has good integration, but I don't really use iTunes so I'm kinda delaying the process

Yes tags is how I organize too. Helps big time!!

Please include and/or everyone in the comment section on how you organize your library if you are a part of multiple record pools ie: crooklyn, funkymix, ultimix, xmix, promo only, etc. I am subscribed to even more. Right now it is all organized like this in my serato crates. I am on format so I have Deep house, electro house, breaks, trap, twerk... dj tools - transitions, party breaks, scratch tools...you get the point. Heeellllpppp!!!

HI. I'm getting back into DJing. I'm pretty old to be getting back in. I'm from the old school. Technics and records. Now, I have a new MacBook Pro and a DJ Controller with some speakers and a current dj helping me out some newer tracks. I've viewed a lot of videos regarding organizing crates in Serato. Your video and another guys video are best, in my opinion. I'm going to combine your suggestions and this other djs' suggestion together. I didn't comment on his page, but I'll let you know who he is. His name is DJ Wiplash. I don't know that dude personally or at all, but you two guys give good advise. And you deserve to know that. Thanks :)

For the last year or so I've really concentrated on condensing the music on my hard drive to just what I need and make sure it's all good quality. The whole idea behind doing this was to make it easier to find the music I want and not to have my library too cluttered. The point being quality not quantity. All my crates in serato and Traktor (I use both) are organised by genre and then sub genre, e.g. I'll have have a crate for hip hop and then have sub crates for old school etc. I try to use iTunes as my master library and then use the individual DJ software to organise my music further. The only other thing I do in iTunes is create a play list every time I download new music so it reminds me to sort it out in Serato and Traktor later. I travel a lot and I find that when I'm sitting on a plane is the best time to organise my music.

Great video 😄 I've been having this problem for quite awhile Really helpful

I have an easy solution that I feel would work for everyone! First off, in order to keep your folders/crates small so when you enter each folder you're not overwhelmed and bombarded, you separate into folder per time period. Let's say in a month I find 40 songs that fit into one particular genre category, I will probably spread that out into two folders, 20 in one, 20 in the other, simple. As time goes on, I create new folders for each genre, my very first one goes 1.0 which may be the 20 songs I found this month, 2.0 folder may be the next 20, and 3.0 might be the first 20 I find next month, and so on. However, the problem people have is that they want great organization, neat looking folders AND they want to bring EVERYTHING. Well, you've got 10,000 songs, how the hell will you keep it clean with 10,000 songs? Simple, inside each one of my time periods for each genre looks like this, Example: HipHop --> 1.0 (time period) --> THIS is where you have two or more folder to click into, I usually create a folder for hype hour tracks, and a folder for warmup tracks, BUT my secret weapon is a third folder called JFK. Not john f kennedy, it stands for, "just for keeps", and I throw everything from that time period witihin that genre I've found that I don't play very often, isn't mainstream and wouldn't generally be played, problem solved! You've got organiation, you know WHERE to go for the tracks you usually play, and then you've got your WHOLE library because every track that ISN'T going to usually or maybe ever be played, is in JFK. BUT YOU STILL HAVE IT, if actually needed, you just NEVER SEE it unless you CHOOSE to.

I definitely got some knowledge out of this video like all of your other videos. Thanks for the knowledge. .

Tough vid to make. You did a great job and I love the train of thought to reduce your crates down and be far more selective. Its just the same as back when you brought records, you didnt have your entire back catalog to dig through.

I use Serato and a program called Alchemie Zinc. Alchemie allows me to build my Serato library (crates) based on my existing folder structure on my hard drive. This means I organize music based on where I save it when I download it. With the exceptions of a few genres (classic rock, older pop, etc.) all the new stuff gets put into a monthly folder. When I open up Serato I already know where to find stuff based on where I saved it. I also take it one step further though. I have "smart crates" which are dynamic crates that can use keywords or other attributes to build a crate on the fly. For those I have several keywords that I put in the comments tag of my tracks. For instance one of the tags is "ladies" another is "peak" and another is "hood", you get the idea. After I enter the the keyword into the comments tag Serato automatically populates the smart crates. Another cool thing about doing it this way is you can have multiple keywords. Say I have a track that is both very popular and appeals to women I can type "peak ladies" and it gets put into both smart crates. Then within crates I sort by Bpm. Also I have a smart crate named transitions the looks for "trans" in the song title and puts them all there. Seems to catch most of my transition tracks.

Great suggestions! I have been filtering my collection by only using USB on the gig. But preparing and practicing on an XDJ RX.

Yow brother that was awesome you gave me ideas because i was struggling with the same thought process.....

I'm a freestyle dj as we) I do mine by decade when it comes to hip hop and r&b (80s- current). I have a crate that says Clean and subcrates under that by decades (80s- current). Then i have a create for Spanish music with subcrates like menerage, bachata, and salsa . I have another full of just instrumentals. Acapellas. Party Breaks. Oldies (60s and 70s). Slow jamz. Remixes. Booty (twerking) . Gogo. Tedsmooth remixes. Tv/movies. It's a lot of songs on my external hard drive but this works for me

Yo, you hit it on the head. I've been agonizing about crates within crates within crates. Nice to know I'm not alone. Then you mentioned tags and comments, bpms, keys, genre's the list goes on and on. Look out, that's been and is going to be time consuming like crazy. But yo, you gotta put the time in now so that the gig flows. If I had a question it would be how to make sure not to double/triple up on songs. There are some that are for example, Hip Hop but that can be broken down to East Coast then to 80's. Where would you drop that song? Peace and keep sharing the knowledge.

I organize by Genre, BPM and Mood! I also have "Lethal Weapon" playlists for decades like the 80s, 90s, etc. I even edit my own genres to things like Pop House or Electro Pop, etc. Then I use SMART CRATES or SMART PLAYLISTS (in itunes) to automatically help me separate them so I can further whittle them into smaller crates/playlists. For example, I will have a crate for all of my commercial "Pop" music (not Hip Hop. That would be a separate crate). Then I would have crates INSIDE of the Pop crate based on mood like Background music for soft Pop songs or higher energy songs that I would play at Peak time in a club. Also, a lot of times I make crates just for certain DJ mixes I want to make or events I will be playing in the future, like a charity sport event, etc.

Besides being a DJ im a music collector. I'm a true music lover got well over 20,000 albums in my collection. That don't mean though I will have ALL those tracks on my laptop I'm using to DJ. Like TLM said according to the type of party/event I'll have just the tracks suitable for that event in a couple different crates organized in BPM etc...

I really enjoy your video's and style of teaching. I now see this is an old video. I'll try to post the comment in a new one. Thanks if you do happen to see this!

We need part two!! Good topic

I've been working in audio for 20 years but not DJing. I organize terabytes of music and sound effects for post-production work. Stop thinking of the songs as music and think of them as a file in a database. Before you can organize your files, you need to organize your data. The obvious fields of information are like song names and artist names. You're going to probably want to know BPMs and musical key signatures. The year of release is not a bad idea as well. You'll probably want a personal rating system. Example: scoring a song with a 0 might mean you'd NEVER play it. Maybe a 3 for something that you'd love to play every time you're performing. There's a dance remix of a Taylor Dane tune from the 80's that I hate with such passion that I had to resist the urge to yank the record from the turntable and snap the vinyl in two. :) The most laborious part would be describing the song as far as genre, maybe some notes about the feel of the song, etc. But you have to do it. So I would first start cataloging everything that scores highly in my rating system. There's no sense in putting that much work into something that's never going to be heard again. There is software available called "Soundminer" from a company with the same namesake. You can add as many fields to the database as you would like associated with the file. You probably wouldn't play your set from Soundminer, but it's great for managing sound files and databasing them and most importantly finding and sorting on the fly by whatever key piece of data you like. You can prepare a crate in this manner and even copy the files to that crate (folder) through the software. You can even save your crate as a database in its own right and then search by crates without having to open a single folder or drop your source music files into genre folders or BPM folder or whatever method you might want to sort your source library with.

still waiting for the 2, 3 and 4 for this man please

I can create crates by a certain bpm range. I mostly play 83-97 bpm. Whatever it's smooth jazz, underground hip hop, downtempo, trip hop, acid jazz, new jack swing, Nu jazz, Neo soul, any song can fit as long as it makes sense to the mix.

My Method would be (since I play 'almost' anything), would be a international collection. So it would start like this: Ethnicity(Korean, Japanese, Spanish, American) ---> Genre (Hip Hop, Pop, Rap, etc...) ----> Artist (Various or On own) -----> Album ---> Track. I just got to find a way to keep track. Every once in while I go through my collection and find out it is getting larger but by ending up with copies. For example I find out there are 6 copies of one entire album.

i organise my music through itunes. What i do i just give each track a genre etc. deep house, hip-hop/rap, dance, tech house, indie rock. Then i go into traktor and all my music will be divided into genre. this method might be too general but i works for me

So Im djing mostly at my school or in some of da clubs in New York or when I'm at home in Munich and what I do is I have different playlist from. Deep house to house to hip hop. So at the beginning I'll try house just to build up the emotions and like happiness of the crowd and when it gets late I'll more and more try me in hip hop and olds cool stuff

My organization is very simple: every genre i its own crate and tracks are in alphabetical order. Thats my base style but for the gigs I put together a set of crates based on my feeling about the upcoming night and crowd. If I know that I'm going to play for example in a birthday party, I choose music that the person having the birthday likes etc. I also leave some room for additional tracks to my crates in case some requests are given during the gig.

The way I organize my stuff is by genre and mood, Meaning I have a crate with e.g. Minimal - Chill, Minimal - Drive, Techno - Hype, Techno - Dark, Techno - Afterhour, DJ Change, and so on. Every Crate has around 50-75 Tracks, which is more then enough to create a certain mood or atmosphere, so if I play Techno - Dark and i see that people get bored of it, I'm gonna change to Techno - Hype, a crate with songs that i know, that people like it (in case of Techno e.g. Conjure Dreams by Marceo Plex). Or if i play an ending set I'm gonna switch from e.g. Minimal Drive to Minimal Chill for the last couple of songs, so people get to know, O.K. the night is over, let get down slowly, so I don't stop in the mid of a Hard Techno track, so people are still to hyped up and thing, dude, you can't stop the set right now in the middle of a hype scenario. It seems to work extremely well, and I've heard some people telling me, that they like that i dont stop in the middle of the hype but let them come down a bit in the end.

Digging the vinyl beard. Happy new year bro

One tip I can share with how my work flow goes in serato is to utilize the "Comments" field to your advantage specifically when you use the "ALL search" feature. For ex there are some tracks that you know you will always play together in most cases, or even if you don't play them together, you can use it to easily tease the crowd and get them pumped! Lets say you play "Nicki Minaj - Wave Ya Hands" and then you normally go for "Ricky Blaze - I Feel Free", what i do is in the comments field for Ricky's song i put "Nicki Wave Hand" so when I do a search both tracks come up the same time, saving you alot of time typing. I also use "Dividers" within my crates so that the tracks don't look so overwhelming when scrolling through. If you need visual example of this let me know.

ill say the easiest way to organize your crates would be to do it by era, lets say on your hip-hop crates, make a sub crate with early 2000's, mid 2000's and late 2000's, whats hot right now, the most important thing its like you said just fill in the crates with music that you'd play at the club

Hi dj shukes a response to organizing crates what I do is have a usb for each decade it works for me so good luck all.

My Solution (works good for me): I realized that more important thing is to know your music! That's why I have 2 big folders, foreign songs and safe space. All my music I store in sub-folders of these 2 basic folders. The songs in the foreign folder (most new music) I will learn, and the ready songs I will shift to a sub-folder of the safe space. In the safe space I separated songs by decades, genre and warm up/prime time. An exactly assignment (reagge or dancehall, rnb or rap...) is not important, because I know the songs very good. For sure shots I set a color tag in Serato. So: Invest your time in learning your music instead of finding a perfect order (there is no) and you will easy find a good order for you!

djtlm i don't see the remaining parts of this video did you ever complete them..... your audience is waiting!

I tend to set up my folders based on music genre, (Hip Hop, R&B, Neo-Soul, Old School R&B) I do subsets for the bigger crates based on location. West Coast Hip hop, Dirty South Hip Hop... 90's R&B and 90's Hip Hop would be subsets as well.

Excellent but difficult topic! This first video gave me already some ideas -- thanks! I wish you could tell us how you organize the physical vinyl shelves (like those behind you on the video). That's a thing that I struggle with most. I have tons of vinyl but it's very, very hard to find any spesific record!

i mostly play dancehall, hip hop, r&b soca i make my crates years and each time i download a song i up date my crates

Hi, i play lots styles , like you. I have crates of hiphop,rnb,dancehall,oldschool hiphop, funk, .... and every song i was mark some color, (red is hits,positive rection,.. , blue is songs what i can use in club partys,....) i think its good idea, you can easy recognize what you need in actualy crate. peace

I like this a lot plus it will get me some ideas I want to do with my crates and organize it for my view eyes so I don't have to worry Spazz around looking for that same hit so that really give me idea I might do something on my live feed on Periscope real soon on that if they need a quick way and not too much heavy but just for like (Clubs Venue's Strip club Birthday Party's House Party's etc) I know when I go to my virtual crates I will have it right there 👍👍👍👍

What I do is: I have one folder for every Genre (House, Trap, Dubstep etc.) and in each folder there are many folders, one for each artist! :) P.S. I'm a digital DJ

2usb both with 2 folder left&right (both about 50-60songs)/ in that genres/ in that folders by BPM, if song has vocal it has V/ at start of name. + folder with my favorites, new releases, etc. 30song max.

Where's Part 2???

Happy holidays, I was wondering what are your thoughts on reloop terminal mix 8 it's a 700 dollar controller I guess you'd call it a "prosumer" controller. What I am trying to ask is that the best controller for a mobile Dj. I wish you all the best

I Have a folder with folders of all my different genres (dubstep, drum and bass, house, etc). Inside each each genre folder I have folders ranging in BPM's (120-130, 130-140 etc) in BPM folder I have my songs

I think i have a pretty good organization for my music, it's also based on your toughts. First in my file browser, I devide everything in it's own genre. In my serato I have the same crates as files i have on my external hard drive. In each genre i make 3 standard crates: Hits, My Likes, 1.1, 1.* If i want to update my collection of songs, I go in the file menu and drag the folder of the song into the main crate. I sort the main crate by date added. After that, the new songs at the top, I devide into collections of 100 songs like this: 1.1 for the first 100 1.2 for the next 100 and so on. When I play music I can go back and forth in time, while also being able to sort my likes and hits, AND easily update my crates. Hope this was helpfull for some of you, sorry for bad english i'm try hard to do good :)

Sharing some info about what I do, and also in response to a question from Ville Säävuori, what I used to do waaaaayyyy back with vinyl, 45s and 12" even LPs. Then I’m going to share what I’m moving towards now, after also a long struggle like everybody else. In the beginning… Even before jack, records were put into a crate by general genre - rock, disco, house, soul, rap - then sorted by BPM. On the sleeve of each, facing the front of the crate, I placed a label that held info on: title; artist name; bpm; track length; intro and outro of the track - length, vocal, instrumental, build up type/fade out etc. Usually I knew this stuff, but occasionally I may want to pull a track in a hurry - like for a request or flash of inspiration - that I hadn't played for some time so wasn't too familiar with); info about any mid song breakdown, bridge, or drop points to mix in/mix out; AND - the very useful one - 3 or 4 great tunes that would go well after that one. In those days it was so much easier to classify the genres as there was less crossover between them but now classifying well by genres has become a nightmare! So now I’m starting to do something similar to the old days using generalised high level genres as my crates, and sub genres (or flavours you might call it), as well as the grouping and comments fields (in iTunes), to aid sorting and searching. This will seem like a lot of work to some, but to me (partly due to an undiagnosed OCD condition, I’m sure!) but also because I really like to be able to search and sort, this is starting to work for me. I use iTunes - but any tagging software could be used (it's important to use one that you know will work seamlessly with your playout software) - I use tags in the genre field to specify the high level genre, and sub-genres like; ROCK (classic rock, blues rock, pop rock, power pop, hard rock, southern rock); ALTERNATIVE (punk, new wave, NDW, alt rock, grunge, indie); METAL (nu metal, rap metal, heavy metal, industrial, gothic); URBAN (funk, old soul, jack swing, electro, rap, trap, hip hop, r&b, neosoul); LATIN (salsa, bachata, meringue, cha cha, tango, rumba, bossa nova, son, samba); POP (europop, brit pop, latin pop, country, folk); DANCE (electrohop, synthpop, electro swing, eurodance, disco, house, latin house, dance rock, dance pop); BREAKBEAT (acid house, uk garage, grime, bigbeat, breaks, drum and bass, dubstep, future bass); EDM (techno, trance, progressive, tech house, hardstyle, big room, electro house, future house); TROPICAL (reggae, tropical house, dancehall, moonbahton, soca, reggaeton); CHILLOUT (trip hop, acid jazz, ambient, deep house, nu jazz, worldbeat, lounge, downtempo); CONTEMPORARY (blues, jazz, ballroom, music hall, easy listening, ballads). The useful thing about this is that I can put sub genres with high level genres that don’t usually fall under each other - example I can tag latin pop, like The Gypsy Kings, under DANCE as well as LATIN and POP; or electrohop, like Black Eyed Peas, under URBAN and DANCE; which means the songs sit in more than one crate in iTunes and in Traktor. In the 'grouping' field I put other track or artist specific info that might help me sort into specific playlists - for example the nationality of the artist, whether it’s explicit or child friendly, used for special occasions like weddings, first dance, birthdays, christmas and so on. I also use the comments field for 'red flags' - songs with explicit lyrics or inappropriate subjects; or for info that I won’t need to sort on but might need to search during a gig on a request - example might be films that a tune has been used in (have you got that tune from Bridget Jones Diary?), or ‘aka’s of the song or the artist - we all know how guests can get the title or artist name totally mixed up! While most tracks or artists naturally fall into specific high level and sub genres, for many I just choose by the way I feel it goes - example would be much of Jamiroquai's music. It's essentially funk or neosoul but I would put it into DANCE (or even CHILLOUT) rather than URBAN as I'm more likely to want to play it after a house or dance pop track than I would a more traditional funk track by, for example, Prince. But if I search or sort on [funk], I get all tracks, whether in the URBAN, DANCE or other crates, brought up. Now, when it comes to making crates and specific playlists, each file has (will have!) the kind of data fields I need to build with. Then, to put them into crates/folders for my playout software (I use Traktor), I assign a code on the 1-5 star rating in iTunes to assign them as - 'floorfiller', 'current/often play', 'may play/possible request', 'background/unlikely play, 'never play' that - together with the top level genres and decade of the track - makes crates such as '90s floorfiller dance’. Also, I put the tags in [] brackets to aid searching in the playout software. Still working on all this but the one change that I’ve made that has immediately improved searching in Traktor, if not organisation, has been the use of the [] brackets. Example, if I search for ‘house’ without these, I get all tracks that have house in the title, genre or name. With [house] I get only those (tagged in the genre field) as [house]. HTH or gives some inspiration. :-)

I separate them by folders and then I color code my bangers, new songs I want to try out, etc..

well i just sort by genre then buy year and sometimes even bpm or album

I actually broke my crates down to genre and time periods ,hits and b-sides in the time periods genres from early 90's and up. and the further I go back musically I just crate hit songs because ppl want to hear those hits and reminisce and usually want certain songs but todays music is so disposable (hits today gone tomorrow ) I just crate it as top hits of that year but im sort of new at it maybe this will change as I become more professional at deejayin

I use the colors in serato. So I may have a hiphop crate and each song will have a color. I use a 4 color method.

This was so helpful

yeh, I had a problem, then I played gig, but hadn't organised right, but there was some organisation: Like songs for warmup some tramce songs requested songs and some popular songs

When you gonna upload part 2? It gonna be helpful i think! :)

you ever going do part 2 this video .eked do great job

when will you drop the next parts ?? im pretty interested .

this point makes a lot of sense why i spend a bunch of time figuring out what to play when i dont have a request

i have a tip that i use take a 15mins a day and build or enhance your folders or crates!!!

Dj TLM. Quick question. I'm currently using an external drive on my computer for doing with serato dj. Can I use an Sd Card and if so, do you have any recommendations for a good sd card.

How can u put crates in alphabetical order ?

I use an external drive...don't want to slow my pc down..and only use programs needed for my pc

I play freestyle and I'm making crates by genre but, all tags are written and I use some keywords into the comments and year a lot. (don't use rating) My bigger crate have 1500 tracks, my whole collection is under 30Gb because I only have the usable tracks.

EXAMPLE ON HOW I DO IT Folder : 2022 1 - R&B / Hip Hop / Afrobeat / Dancehall (90 - 110) 2 - House / Garage (120 - 140) 3 - Trap (60 - 70) 4 - Drill (70 - 75) 5 - Trap (70 - 89) 6 - D&B (80 - 90) 7 - Set Closers (e.g. Without You by Kid Laroi or Wonderwall by Oasis) Only download songs you actually need (e.g. What's hot right now & what you like A LOT)

2015 ended two days ago... man time flies lol

this is a good topic

i am loving the video bro.. this question is not about crate organizing, but i want to know what kind of external hard drive do you recommend. i am in need of one...

"As small as possible"... is there a limit to the number of songs you'll put in your crates/folders?

djTLMtv do you recommend to load iTunes library in Serato Scratch Live?

I like keeping my tracks in folders that are identified by key first. Then within that folder I will sub it out into different categories. I.E Bangers or Scooby Snacks. New Tracks I just love Etc.

Has part 2 been released yet for this topic?

Putting together music is my least favorite part of deejaying! For me, every party has its own playlist. I'll start by making a new playlist and filling it with appropriate music from other playlists, as well as recently downloaded songs. Then I'll go through my entire library from A-Z, grabbing whatever songs I think I will need. From this list I'll divide the tracks into sub-crates based on the feeling/genre/function. I try not to have too many subcrates and I sometimes will combine smaller sub-crates, but I feel like it's easier to find what I need based on the feeling or genre. After that I try to follow my instincts and delete whatever songs I don't think I'll need because less is more. I also play vinyl, but it's basically the same process. I try not to pack too many records and never more than one crate unless my set is really long. Sometimes I don't have time to follow every step, but i would rather be prepared. I'm primarily a House deejay, but you can apply this method to any style.