Library control of your music

Jeez it's ages since I posted anything on my blog and now this is a boring technical post but I thought it might be a) of use to some fellow DJs and b) show me up for the nerd I really am. It also might prompt someone to say - Jeez you don't need to make it complicated. Do it like this! :)

I don't know how you control your music files - not on SAM but at source - which is where a lot of problems occur if you start reallocating folders and forget to 'tell' SAM. And that's when a lot of tunes immediately fly off the queue in front of your astonished eyes. OK so I'll come to coping with that later.

First your PC source. How do you store your music files? Well, like most people I guess, I have a hierarchy of folders. And at the top of the 'pyramid' is the master folder you want to load into SAM. I've got four of those because I've got four separate SAM playlists (hoping we can cope with each DJ having more than one playlist at some point) but more of that later.

My master SAM playlists are LIVE (which is the only one readers of the website can see), COUNTRY, FOLK and SWING, simply because a) I broadcast on three channels b) I don't want to advertise songs on a particular channel which I don't want to include - and if they're there and you get asked for them, it's hard to refuse and c) ease of file management.

Clearly the more songs you have in any folder, the longer it takes to add new ones and sort them, and by the time you are up to 50,000 or so songs that could be quite testing.

So I have four SAM folders and a matching 'set' behind the scenes to reflect that on my source PC. On my PC I have SAM LIVE, SAM COUNTRY, SAM FOLK, SAM SWING and within each of those the individual artist folders applicable to each genre. Within each artist, of course, individual albums so the whole thing groups up as:-

Song -> Album-> Artist-> Genre (SAM LIVE eg)

But the first thing I do when downloading new material is to run it through MP3GAIN so that the volume settings are all correct before loading the music to the permanent files so I have a parallel set of folders for this early entry onto my PC each called 'PREGAIN' one each for each genre.

So if I am downloading 'Rollin and Tumblin' music I dump it into LIVE PREGAIN, keeping it free of the master files while I process the volume program. When all the volume settings are done I move the content of 'PREGAIN' to 'SAM LIVE' so I know that all the material in SAM LIVE is clean and processed. That also leaves PREGAIN free for the next batch of downloads and the whole thing moves pretty sweetly. And of course a parallel situation happens for country, folk and swing

Then updating SAM. If you have only downloaded a few albums and made a note of where they are in the PC hierarchy then you can load them as individual directories. If however you have loaded a lot of new artists and albums and -even more dangerous - added tunes into existing folders, then it is a good idea to take a deep breath and clear the whole of your playlist on SAM and reload it all from the master pyramid folder - even if that is 20,000 or more songs. It doesn't take that long and it's the only way to ensure that the path of each song from source to SAM is uncorrupted.

Now I'm waiting for some one to say 'Hell's teeth you've been doing all that? Why didn't you..................."