After searching through the forums, I was unable to find relevant posts regarding this topic. Basically, I am a hip-hop DJ and used to all my vinyl having the clean+dirty+instrumental+acapella layout most of the time. Migrating to the digital world, I find it very awkward and inconvenient to have the 4 different versions of the songs spread out as 4 different tracks. This is especially true when digging around the crates looking for music to mix, having to scroll past 4 different versions of a song is very time consuming. My idea is fairly basic. Have some sort of "master" track for each song (for example, select 4 versions of the song, right click and chose combine. software automatically detects each version, and spreads them along the markers using the fairly standard c+d+i+a layout I mentioned above,) which in turn houses the 4 (if applicable) versions inside of it. Each version is linked to the 5-min marker ring on the control record. When digging around the music library, all you see is the name of the song, not 4 different versions clogging up valuable screen space and confusing you. As you load the song to the deck, you needle drop to any of the 5-min markers and boom, you have the right cut. In my opinion, this would be an absolutely killer addon to the software, and not too difficult to implement. I realize that some songs may be longer than 5 minutes, however I personally rarely encounter them, which should be true for most. Let me know what you all think.

www.scratchlive.net

a good work around

Czer, this has been suggested before here www.scratchlive.net - so I suggest to repost there (I love this idea).

thanks all for the replies. nik39, my use for this feature would be mainly for mapping of clean/dirty/instrumental/acapella versions of one song for convenience. the post you referred me too mainly talks about letting songs play in a row. That's not really what I want, I want the simplicity of navigating to music appearing as 1 file, and the convenience of jumping around it with a needle, but without the hassles of combining all tracks into one file as the work around suggests.

Basically, you got a track 1 playing in deckA, load track 2 into deckB, needle drop to 3rd ring on record to get instrumental, beat match, drop the instrumental on the chorus, let chorus play out, load track 2 into deck 1, needle drop to first ring if playing for a sensitive crowd or second ring if playing in a club, scratch it in, etc.. Basically, no running to laptop to choose instrumental, acapella, etc. Thats benefit #1. Benefit #2 is no looong lists of songs in database because each song appears as 4 seperate files. Benefit #3 over workaround is the flexibility (remap tracks any time u want) and no extra work required joining together hundreds of tracks. The way I invision it, again, is just select all 4 versions, right click, and click "Combine & Map" or something and boom, you're done. For us urban dj's, this would be killer. Blending, beat juggling, scratching would be just as streamlined as with real vinyl (or even better.)

I am really looking forward to someone from Serato/Rane replying to this. Really want to see what they have to say.

I understand your point(s) (thats exactly the reason I want such a function as well, besides of being able to quick mix even faster or easier) but I still think its covered by that ohter linked topic as thats basically the same idea, just a different area of application. IMHO it belongs there.

nik, thanks for all the replies. i almost believed you were a 16 yearold girl from the czech republic too.

I dont know what that has to do with this thread here, but good that we got things clear now. ;)

I like your idea and I think you will find it's related to this...

www.scratchlive.net

check this too...

www.scratchlive.net

I REALLY like the aspect of your suggestion that would group all the versions under one reference on the track list (and thus saving endless scrolling time). That is VERY sharp and I think a lot of people are having that problem.

You could do this yourself, make your own MP3's...

Just put radio version @ 00:00, Instrumental Version @ 05:00, and acapella @ 10:00 in a 15:00 file in any sound editor.

Or, don't even bother with the time thing, and use reletive mode. (Once anyone gets a 57, you will use relative 90% of the time. And the other 10% for me is when one deck is in internal, ad I am cutting over it...)

djk, I have thought about doing that. It is just too much work for most of us who have thousands of songs and i also don't its inflexibility, the way the songs arranged are fixed, etc. My idea doesnt physically combine any files, it just "groups" them into one to make it easier to handle. It's simply a way to represent something more efficiently.

Yeah DJK that's an elaborate work around for someone with a big library. I really like this suggestion.

Fast forward 3.5 years into the future, and I am STILL DYING for this feature. Add Intros and Videos to the pot and I have so much redundant names to scroll through that by the time I'm done girls are walking barefoot.

With all the advances of storing metadata in MP3 files using custom geob frames and in MP4 files using custom Atoms, I think the possibility of implementing this is very real, and I am crossing my fingers (as I have been for the past 3 years) that Serato will finally do something like this.

I _refuse_ to keep my library small by cutting back on versions, you never know when you may be doing Radio and need a clean cut but tossed it earlier or when you want to have a cut or even freestyle session but tossed that perfect instrumental. So for the most part, I have Clean, Dirty, Clean Intro, Dirty Intro, Instrumental for like 80% of my music. Then there's Clean Acapella and Dirty Acapella for the ones that have it. And of course there's MP4s now with custom versions like Xtendz, Snipz, BlenX, my head hurts.

Now originally when I suggested this I was spinning in Absolute mode and not using cuepoints. Now I camp out in Relative mode and fly around with cue points. Yea, I guess I sold out a bit from strictly vinyl emulation, but who hasn't, it makes us more creative! So alternatives like suggested (stitching all versions into one big mp3) do not seem as lucrative now as they did 3 years ago. The loss of cuepoints sucks.

Serato now has various needle dropping methods for tying the best of both modes together. I think this could easily be translated into the track grouping/mapping. A custom tag could be written in the mp3/mp4 file that says" I am Dorrough - Ice Cream Paint Job (Acapella).mp3 and I belong to "Dorrough - Ice Cream Paint Job", the latter being the grouping. When the db gets scanned, all the versions show up as 1, with buttons/shortcuts/something of that nature in each deck letting you switch over. You could also stay in relative mode and use the rings to needledrop as well, if you want.

Also as we are moving onto new modern containers such as MP4, the idea of storing 2+ audio tracks per MP4 doesn't seem too far fetched at all. In some cases, one could save 4x as much as space (when Clean/Dirty acapellas exist) without sacrificing the flexibility of having multiple versions. This means 100mb instead of 400mb, 3 minutes downloading instead of 12 and maybe even cheaper pool costs as they can save big $ on bandwidth costs.


What do y'all think, are you with me?

Definitly. It would be a very, very cool feature.

ive always wanted a feature which reduced the entries in my libraries, and just have 1 file per song which somehow included all versions.

What I like to do is switch between a Dirty version to a instrumental or acapella (i do this now by lining up my mp3s beforehand so they are all in sync). What this means in a live mix is loading up the the track when you want to switch. I would prefer if all i had was 1 file in my library, and keyboard shortcuts to switch to the different versions.

not sure if this is what you were thinking - but i still like your idea

I think it's an awesome idea :D

As my library grows and grows, this would make it so much easier to keep track of things!

+1

Yes please!!