Turning music folders into Serato gold — Alchemie Zinc

I love iTunes. It keeps my music library neat and tidy, and stays nicely synced with all my DJ software. But it’s not for everyone. Some positively hate the lack of flexibility and wish that they could manage their libraries in a simple and logical way – like in a folder/file way just like their music is most probably organised on their hard drives. We’ve seen products like ScratchTools before that convert iTunes libraries to Serato Crates, but Alchemie Zinc takes it almost to the magical nirvana place of files and folders into Serato crates.

Here’s what they have to say:

Overview

As DJ’s we know that time is your most valuable resource.

If you are a Pro DJ, or a DJ hobbyist you spend countless hours, days and even months arranging your valuable music collection on your hard drive, and removable storage devices. Why should you have to duplicate this process in various applications? Are you frustrated with adding new songs to your hard drive and then having to deal with the tedious steps of adding all the crates and subcrates again in your DJ Application? We at Alchimie, as DJ’s, have contended with this issue ourselves and have decided to create a tool to remedy this issue.

Alchimie Zinc™ allows a DJ to use their “existing” Hard Drive file structure to sync music into one of the most popular DJ applications on the market, “Serato Itch”, “Serato Scratch Live”, and “Serato DJ Intro”. With a simple graphical user interface your DJ Management needs are met with the click of a button.

Alchimie™ has many features that are sure to save you valuable time to get you back to doing what you do best….Performing.

Essentially,  Alchimie Zinc™ maintains a list of “Media Roots”, these are Folders/Directories that you add manually or simply drag and drop from your file system.  These “Media Roots” correspond to crates in your DJ program.  When you are ready,  you can then synchronize this list (along with all sub folders) into your Serato application in mere seconds.  This feature in and of itself can potentially save hours,  or even days of tedious crate setup – but that’s not all!

• Add, Rename, Remove “Music Roots” at will.
• Add a media file (MP3′s etc) from your file system into a “Media Root”.
• Synchronize to SSL/Itch with or without overwriting your current crates and (optionally) with a backup of your current crate structure before the sync begins.
• When you are on the move,  no need to take your PC with you! Simply use Alchimie Zinc to synchronize your songs and crates to an external device such as a USB thumb drive or other external storage device.  On the destination PC,  SSL/Itch will automatically recognize this and import your crates and songs!
• Export your song list to a spreadsheet (CSV Format).  Alchimie Zinc™ can understand most ID3 meta tags and will include this information in your spreadsheet export.
• Manually backup your Serato application crate structure at any time.
• Using Alchimie Zinc’s™ UI, Drag and drop columns, change sort orders on various IDv3 tags, remove or add columns then use the “Set Columns” function to set the SSL or Itch default columns to your preference.
• Missing Files?  No problem,  Alchimie Zinc’s™ “Find Lost Files” feature will examine the crate structure of your choice and report back any problem that it finds.
• Have an existing Crate structure in SSL/Itch that you like?  Use the “Import Database” function to import these crates into Alchimie Zinc™.
• Alchimie Zinc’s™ UI is skinnable and comes with several different (dark, low contrast) themes that are great to use in low lighting conditions.
• And much more!

We have many more features planned in the the near future so stay tuned!

I wonder what the future holds? Traktor? Virtual DJ? We can only hope. Great work guys. You can grab a demo version for yourself. You can also watch a serious amount of video tutorials to help you get through the basics.

UPDATE: I’ve quite rightly been compelled to tell you that ScratchTools can do all the stuff Alchemie Zinc does plus an awful lot more including converting Traktor libraries including loops and cues into a Serato format – and it’s free. The big difference is that ScratchTools lacks a decent GUI, which is quite a draw for the less computer savvy out there.

Alchemie Zinc has an introductory offer of $19.99 until October 18th, after which point it goes up to $29.99.