Moving out of iTunes - is this a good workflow?

With the elimination of iTunes in Catalina (and no, I'm not installing it any time soon), I've decided to just move away from using iTunes altogether. I'll maintain a separate Apple Music library, but that is for syncing with my iPhone and for casual listening. For DJ'ing, I am planning to just move to native Rekordbox.

My DJ collection is around 10,000 tracks. I managed to just drag all the files (in batches) into a "DJ Tracks" folder on my Mac. I debated using some sort of folder structure, but that becomes hard to maintain (and it's what organization systems based on metadata, like Rekordbox, are for).

I've now imported all 10,000 tracks into Rekordbox and it's off doing it's thing analyzing all the files.

For new tracks I download, I plan to just copy them into that DJ Tracks folder, and importing them from the Explorer.

Anyone see anything weird about this workflow or have some suggestions to make it better? It seems deceptively simple, I just don't want to get bit by some limitation with having a single folder with so many files (which isn't an issue for modern file systems).

Ryan0751 September 26, 2019 23:07

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I have a similar set-up with some minor differences.

First, after downloading I use Fakin' the funk to check on bitrate/spectrum of a track. Is that WAV really WAV or MP3 converted to WAV. The good tracks are then moved from the Download folder to my Music Prep folder.

I then put it through Kid3/MP3Tag and make sure the tags are cleared of DJ Pool advertisement. And the file name is <artist name> - <title>. This helps prevent me from adding duplicates to my library I forgot. Once this is done the tracks are moved to my Music folder.

Next up is importing into RB and analysing. Also start using MyTag. This feature is one of the most underrated things in RB.

Not everybody agrees to putting all your tracks in one folder.

Ves September 28, 2019 15:52 0 votes