Music for DJs:
where the tracks come from.

One source, not five. Buy from three shops and your collection lives in three places and none of it is findable. Decide by what your genre actually stocks, and by the file format you want.

Everything new lands in the same place, wherever it came from. That is not a filing principle but a gate: what sits here is not yet put away — and you can see at a glance how much work has piled up.

Artist and title stay, everything else goes: shop tags, version numbers, words like “final”. The test is simple — can you recognise the track in a list of two hundred without playing it? Renaming later means doing it in two places.

Only now does the file enter the program. The analysis works out tempo, grid and key — and those are what you need while sorting, not first in the set. An unanalysed track is a surprise in a transition.

The step nearly everyone skips, and the only one that turns a file into a tool. Note two things: where does the intro end, and what happens in the breakdown? Without those two answers you can play the track but not use it.

Not by genre but by when you play it: opener, build, peak, closer. In a set you never ask “which genre” but “what now” — and the order has to match the question you ask at the decks. Only once the track is here is the inbox one lighter.