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as-is to support the Serato Users. This is my way of showing love for the
product to the community.
--C-Zer
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These are the steps I documented for what works for
me and to what I think is fairly clean and standard. I hope this helps
those with the same concerns. I try to rip all my MP3s in this format
and this method. Feel free to email me or AIM me if you have questions.
This has worked for both my DJs on MAC and PC in my record pool. MAC
of course is an extra step to bring your MP3s to PC in order to batch
tag....
Note: If you own a MAC/Powerbook – There is a method of having a PC see a Macintosh
over the network then you can run the software above on your MP3s
collection over the network. For this to work, you must understand
how to network two computers together.
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The integration between ITunes
and Serato The ultimate question: Why use ITunes?
What do Smart Playlists do? Well as stated above “MP3 Tagging” if you have your Genres tagged right, you can drag all your files into the ITunes Library and they will get placed into that Smart Play list. For example, let’s say I do one for Hip-Hop:
Live updating will update all your tracks, so that when you close ITunes, your Serato will populate with the new Smart Playlist and Tracks to go with it just like in ITunes. Kewl! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My biggest complaint
was that sometimes I would delete tracks from a directory through
explorer, and the playlists in ITunes will still contain
a link to that song (file). I use to delete the whole ITunes Directory file database to not have to search for broken
links, but this created havoc, because I would tend to do this a
lot. Well now you don’t have to, there’s software that goes through
and verifies the links to existing tracks. Works like buttah!.
The site doesn't exist so you can try this tool:
Finally, and most importantly, let’s say you get new tracks, and you don’t want to open up/install anymore programs. Have your ITunes open, and create a dummy playlist called Temp. Drag your new tracks in the dummy playlist (called mine ‘temp’) and tag away (after multi-bpming them with MixMeister – PC ONLY).
An Important
field that is left off by default is the BPM field in ITunes.
To turn it on, you must go to Edit -> View Options (Ctrl+J)
That way you have a clear visual of what is tagged for bpms. Additionally, when you open Serato, click on the column that says BPM. That way you can sort your tracks by BPM. Hit it again if you want to start your sets with slower/faster BPMs.
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How to Organize
Your Music Using ITunes (PC/MAC) These methods are in no means written in stone and are definitely not always correct, but they have worked for DJ C-Zer (http://www.djczer.com) 99% of the time. There is no real “quickie” way on how to organize your music. Especially if you have over 50k (200gb) of songs like myself. So, with that here it goes…. Before opening up iTunes,
know your music. Know your music and most importantly know your music!
If you are one of those guys that just rips from CDs and Vinyl well
damn it, good for you because you’re just on the right track to organizing
your music. You should be connected to the internet so that the CDDB
(Music Database) can correctly tag your artists and song tracks. By
default, iTunes does not rip to MP3. You
must set this setting and I typically am satisfied anywhere between
192+ (quality). So a screen shot for these
settings in iTunes (Located in Preferences
-> Edit -> Advanced Tab -> click on sub tab “Importing”.
Your settings should look like this:
If you’re the other guy that watched your best friend spin with all his digital music and copied all his mp3s, well go back to the beginning of this paragraph and know your music! It will take the latter a longer time to know it because like anything else, if you don’t know your music, you’re not going to get organized. Once you know your music, create folders for Genres! Not Artists. Don’t let iTunes handle your music, or else all will fail. So the best way to do this is to make sure before importing your tracks, that you have “Keep iTunes Music Folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” unchecked. If you have this checked, then you’re asking for trouble because since you didn’t tag all your music like you were suppose to, iTunes will create folders by artists and if your tags aren’t correct, it’ll be a mess.
Ok so now that you got all your music sorted out. Here’s an example of what my music looks like in folders by Genres. Some Folders have depths of different Genres like my Spanish folder….
So now you get the idea. This makes life easier when you have all your music organized in folders by Genre. Why? Because lets say you don’t want to carry all your music on your laptop. You can simply drag the Genre Folders from an external drive or network in your laptop when you need to do a gig that requires that specific genre. The above collection is on my server at home and that server backs up the collection on another server. To give you an idea of why I take backups so seriously J. There is no cheap data recovery method, but if you backup, well then that’s hours and hours of hard work being saved. I heard that DJ Jazzy Jeff carries 2 laptops and 3 external drives for backups. Smart cat. Not all of us are ballas like him, so we must improvise and shop at our local swap meet (el swap meet!) and buy stuff cheap. Ok, so now you got your Genres all sorted out by the names “you are familiar with”. It doesn’t have to be perfect, as long as YOU know where everything is at. The next step is to create and verify all your tracks have the proper genre tag before actually creating a “Smart Playlist”. So go into iTunes and create a folder (CTRL+N) called Temp.
Click on the new playlist you created “temp” Drag and drop your “Genre” folder you created earlier. In this example I’ll use Jazz.
As you can see some of the song names contain “Charlie Parker”, so this is not a completed Genre yet. Do notice the Genre field, they all say Jazz and the BPMs field all are tagged nicely (MixMeister Rules). Another trick is to click on Library at the top…
Then click on Edit -> Show Browser (Ctrl + B)
This is a nice method to clean up all your music at once! Yes, that’s right, even after you have sorted your Music by Genres, and you’re not happy with the tag information, then you can do it all here. Steps: 1) Notice that above I have 49 Genres in this example. If I click on AlternRock, it will show me all the tracks with AlternRock in there:
But say you’re the type of person that just doesn’t like to have TOO many genres, so you keep it all generic as Alternative. All you have to do is ‘Select All’ the songs in that list (Ctrl+A), bring up your menu to ‘get info’ and click on Get Info.
You will see a ‘Multiple Song Information’ dialog box…
Where the Genre says ‘AlternRock’, type in Alternative, click OK and then all your music in this list of ‘AlternRock’ is set to the list of ‘Alternative’. iTunes will automatically notice that you no longer have any songs with the Genre ‘AlternRock’ and will therefore remove it from the “Browser of Genres”. I just cut my Genres down to 48 instead of 49. Continue doing this for all your sets. Yes it’s a lengthy process, but believe me when I say it, “When you do it the right way, you will thank yourself later because you know exactly where everything is at” You are now able to create smart playlist that will bring in your Alternative music. Steps to create smart playlists: 1) Click on File -> New Smart Playlist
2) In the new dialog box, set your settings like the one below.
3) Notice a different color icon for the ‘Smart Playlist’. Anytime you bring in new music, delete all your temp tracks (it won’t delete the actual mp3, just the link to it) and then drop in the new tracks into temp. Name them by Genre like stated above and you’re set to be organized in no time. Smart Playlists do live updating which means they will hold your newly imported tracks…
Happy Organizing! ------------------------
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How to Stopping Clipping in MP3 Files for Newbies
"Clipping" is when the music hits max volume
and gets distorted.
Hope this helps all! 16 pages of goodness. Holla back on the guestbook and let me know how it has helped you….
DJ C-Zer http://www.DJCZer.com AIM/Y!: DJCZer1
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Copyright 1996-Present. CesarRamirez.com aka DJCZer.com. All Rights Reserved.