We love it when our beloved readers like and share what we do. But it’s equally nice when one of the companies that we write about likes the cut of our jib, and invites one of us to write for them too. This is what happened to our Dan Morse, when he was asked by Native Instruments to contribute a fraction of his considerable knowledge to their blog.
In his article, Dan unloads his expertise in the areas of Traktor library and music management. In it, he covers the basics and more detailed elements of music wrangling in Traktor, as well as offering tricks and tips that could be used for anyone wanting to manage music in their own particular software of choice.
On a personal level, I’m really proud that the work of one of our own has caught the attention of the wider industry beyond the scope of being a bloody good read. Indeed, last month saw Arkaei opening the Red Bull finals in Poland. This for me is validation that we have the best team in the industry. Bloody good work guys.
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You must have caught it from me.
Congrats, Dan!
So you DJWORX guys now do shoot great pictures, perform great showcases and write great content for the industry.
What’s next?
All of the above, but more. And start a boy band, create a DJ fragrance, and drink blood from the skulls of our enemies.
Sounds good. You’re a little late on the fragrance, though ;)
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Goddammit. I never execute my brilliant ideas. It’ll have to the revolutionary DJ t-shirt we’ve been designing — black, cap sleeves and a wide neck. We’ve dumped our life savings into coming up with this unique idea. It’s going to be huge.
Very nice, sir!
Unfortunately, due to NI’s approach to their Traktor product as well as Traktor’s overly archaic library management, this article was not so well received on the NI boards…
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/how-to-manage-your-traktor-track-library-in-the-90s.325247/
Imo these are all good tips – but, they are all aimed at working around a music library system that was behind the times / archaic already when it was released in 2008 with Traktor Scratch Pro 2, so the criticism shown there is less about the write up, and more about NI’s approach to Traktor as a product they’ve not shown much love for in the last 2-4 years, and the library, which has been one of the pain points in Traktor ever since…
Do they advocate leaving your music in chaos on your hard drive? Or worse, letting iTunes do it?! My point was to stay organised in both. The files still exist on the physical drive, and keeping that organised and portable helps you stay on top of things. The entire reason for writing the article was for people that haven’t bothered with any organisation, as a starting point.
No one is pretending like Traktor doesn’t need some work, but NI are the ones who commissioned the content, so that’s who it’s aimed at.
Re: “No one is pretending like Traktor doesn’t need some work, …”
Well, NI is… by commissioning an acrticle on how to keep working with the archaic system that’s been a point of criticism for 10 yeas now (sending the signal that there’s not going to be any changes to this anytime soon… or so one could interpret it).
But yea, the latest signals from NI, i.e. doing user interviews on location and getting in touch with some advocates of DJ tech such as yourself does at least hint at that they indeed have started to think about rebooting what is now a zombiefied version of its’ former Traktorial self (imo).
But only time will tell… I would welcome if there is an updated Traktor version, but as is, I have not used my Traktor gear for years as I needed to move on as Traktor has become unusable for me unfortunately and NI’s actions did not instill any confidence in the product at all.
Dear Dan, thanks for the article. I don’t want to participate in the discussion about Traktor’s abyssmal track management. As a former NI employee I can at least tell you that there is something coming which will pleasantly suprise everyone.
Regarding manually managing your music:
I manually managed my library (through iTunes) for 10 years and was never fond of the idea when I had to switch to a new Macbook last year. My new one only has a single harddrive and up until now the music resided on the 2nd harddrive. There was NO WAY to migrate the data to another location (not even with symlinks etc.) so I had to bite the bullet and let iTunes manage the locations.
I have never been happier with that decision because all the manual labour of moving the files on the harddrive did not really server a real purpose. After all I still had to rely on the playlists to find the music which is perfectly fine because the same track can be in multiple playlists.
iTunes is a necessary evil because I am using different DJ softwares (RekordBox, Traktor, Serator) and its the only real crossover library option. Doug’s AppleScripts you can embed in iTunes cover a lot of power user needs. https://dougscripts.com. I always wanted to create an iTunes music management masterclass series on YouTube. This may be just the right time to kick it off.
Rekord Buddy!
Great article Dan! Been reworking my track library so it was a timely release. Not sure about Beatport Pro. It’s been a bit, er… Fiddly? But the other tips were spot on!
If anyone needs, I found a pretty decent trick with MP3Tag to get metadata from Beatport for any tracks you might have that had their ID3 tags iTunesed