I don't think you can create a custom ID3 tag, but I could be wrong.

Personally, I deal with it by trying to know my music. The only critical information I really need is really Title, Artist, BPM and key can be handy at times. I only use the tags to help sort the music or quickly find a song or group of songs. If it's a song I don't really know I can usually look at the waveform and get a general ideal of what's going on in the track and if not listen to it cued up in my headphones for a bit to see what's going on.

What I have been doing is adding information into the composer field. Personally I don't care about who composed a song. So I put other information like FAVE, CRAP, Top 40 etc. Then when I create my smart folders I can use that information to help pull songs into a crate or keep them out.

You could use Cue points to mark where Vocals begin and color them yellow for example so anytime you see a yellow cue point you know vocals come in. Use another colored red to let you know Hey I gotta mix out quickly I only have X bars left. Use a green one for good places to begin mixing out and so on. Get creative!

This! I colour code the same as the wave form. Red for bass sections, green for vocals, synths etc, pale blue for hi end stuff. Other colours I use for scratch samples, marking info like bpm changes, key changes, fade points blar blar blar.
When a song of mine loads I know exactly what's going on with the song structure just from a quick glance at the cue pads.

There is no right or wrong, but this system works perfectly for me.

you can change the name of your cue points to information you might want to know

I would personally love to be able have user-definable tag fields in SDJ. It's built right there into the ID3 spec for MP3 but when you consider that SDJ also has to accomodate multiple file formats which may not have the same tag options it's more understandable why it doesn't support them.

+1 though :)

Luckily for you, the reasons you've given don't really require custom tags and most of what can be done has already been suggested:

1) Use other available tags to make comments
There are still several to choose from, though be careful as many have a character limit and can't hold anywhere near as much info as the comments field.


2) Name your cues and loops
For loops you can specify the range and for cues you could write how many bars before or after an event. I don't do this but it might work for you.


3) Develop your own color-code system to help you
I do this religiously. My advice would be to take your time thinking this one through because changing it later can be awkward and time-consuming. i wish we had a tool that would let us edit cues on multiple files at once but that's another story.

=)

What I do (and I know lots of other DJs do too), is tag my songs.
Each 32 beats, I assign a letter.
B = simple beat
R = stronger beat
A = only lyrics
C = lyrics with beat background
L = beat plus melody
T = only melody
S = not even beats
...

A song would be something like this
SAAA BBTT .T RRRR LLLL SAAS TT MMC RRR.R MMMT CRRB B

you can set your own tags, as long as you understand them
So, you can store this text string in the comment tag of the ID3, and display it with any editor/player ;)

We should not need to make up work-arounds here due to the fact that SSL nor SDJ expose metadata in a user-centric way, instead we should get access to the metadata... like:

THIS!
True for most other formats too... please Serato, expose the header for the more tech savy people. Plus the mapping I requested in the other thread...
Churs.
c.