A great article from Joshua below regarding storing and organising your music with iTunes. Having recently just converted over to Traktor Scratch Pro I am using iTunes to organise my music and am finding it a great help.

“DJs generally have a large music collection and I am no different: 15,000+ vinyl records, a shelf full of cds (both store bought and burned) and 500+GB of digital music. As a Mac person, all of my digital music is organized in iTunes. I like iTunes. Sure, it has a few faults like the incessant checking for gapless playback information on a few tracks that I can’t seem to get it to turn off, but, in general, it is pretty robust and does the job. iTunes has been my program of choice for 8 years now, both for my personal music collection, the tracks I dj with and to organize the music for my digital distribution company, AMP Collective.

One of the things I use most in iTunes is Playlists. I use them to organize groups of music to burn the cds I use to dj (I am not a laptop dj). Using Playlists serves several purposes: when I get a lot of new music, I go through and rate the tracks and then group the best tracks in a ‘master’ group by giving it a playlist. Ratings is another feature in iTunes that I just started using in earnest in the past couple years. I only rate the tracks I will play out and those either get 4 or 5 stars – tracks below that threshold are not worthy for me to play (that is part of my job as a dj). From the master playlist, I then make smaller groups by playlist that will each fit on a cd. I always burn two copies of each cd to put in my wallet so that I can either play two copies of a track, or another track on that cd even if one is playing in the other CDJ.

When I got back from Miami about ten days ago, I could tell something was amiss with the external drive that stores my entire iTunes library. Even if nothing was wrong, the drive would run out of space in a matter of weeks and it is always good practice to leave approximately 1/3 empty space on any drive for maximum performance. Now, I was getting the dreaded Mac beach ball every time I wanted to play a track. It would eventually play, but I just knew this drive’s days were numbered. It was important that I got everything off this drive and moved it to a new drive before it completely died. First, I did the usual checks in Disk Utility and the drive started to unmount itself before Disk Utility could finish any repairs. This is never a good sign. When the drive would stay mounted long enough to complete a repair, Disk Utility would say the drive was OK, but I knew this just wasn’t the case…”

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