Serato DJ Lite / Intro General Discussion

Forum
 Serato DJ Lite / Intro General Discussion
Serato newb. Best way to organise crates/files/HD storage.
Talk about Serato DJ Lite / Intro software and controllers.

Serato newb. Best way to organise crates/files/HD storage.

soulboy 9:08 AM - 2 October, 2018
Hi, oldskool DJ here. Brought up on vinyl/1210's, out of the game for about 10 years and want to get back into it. I've downloaded Serato lite and loaded in a couple of tracks to play with. I've got a huge library on CD that I recorded direct from vinyl in studio quality.

Before I start converting all my CD's to sound files so I can use them, I want to check the best way to go about it. I was planning on going for AIFF files as I use a mac and I want the best quality. I've got about 150 CD'S full of tracks, so at that quality I may need an external HD as my mac's only got 64GB SSD. What type of drive is best/suitable/reliable for those of you who use one already? Will this still work o.k using a USB hub, as the mac's only got one USB socket and when I get a controller later that will be using it?

All my CD's are self recorded so I'll have to put all the artists and track names in manually. I've used Itunes to do this initially, and I guess just importing one CD of tracks at a time makes sense or it will get complicated?

Elsewhere on the forum someone mentioned that once crates are created, you can't change their order. Therefore, I guess it makes sense to create crates, and the tracks that will go in them first, with the tracks that you will play most often? I used to play a lot of house/techno, then got more into soul and funk which is what I mainly play now, so I guess that should be first?

Any advice or thoughts much appreciated. I know this is going to be quite a big task, I just don't want to spend weeks loading it all in and then can't arrange things how I want.

Thanks
YZ 7:38 PM - 2 October, 2018
There's no "best" way to organize your music 1st off.

I can tell you the way I do it:

Organize your music at the physical level. Meaning create folders and sub folders just like you would with crates and sub-crates. In 99% of cases (if you keep a uniform structure on your hard drive), it's never over-complicated to recreate your serato crates from scratch. The physical overview is also an overview of your serato crate layout so you're only managing your Hard Drive structure, keeping it a single point of administration.

For me, I use iTunes now and iTunes looks looks just like my HD, therefore Serato looks just like iTunes. I use iTunes strictly for Smartcrates (ie, music added over the past 2 weeks) as well as tagging purposes.

Managing your library sucks if your tagging sucks too. Get something like Tag Scanner to do multi-tagging and make it a habit. I can't tell you how many friends of mine have shitty song names with badly formed meta tags and track names. Once you're tagged, drop into your HD location, then from there to iTunes. If you want to get super geeky you can probably find a script that sync's your physical hd with itunes so you don't have to keep adding individual tracks.

... but if you ask me, keep your HD as your single point of organization.
DJ_X_Trodinaire 11:53 PM - 10 October, 2018
Couple links below that are very very very useful.
First link thanks to a long time forum member: 6
turntablemix.com

serato.com

For my personal experience since ScratchLive:
1) Tag your song properly and thorough. This will help you organize your library tremendously. Follow the above link. This is a perfect time for you since you are starting from scratch.
2) Keep your folders to a minimum. Less strain on Serato to look for your files.
- Avoid: Folders/folders/folders/folders/folders/song.mp3. Less folder (file path) is better.