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Take a look back at where you’ve been for a moment. Remember when your space was packed with crates full of records? You probably had a good system of organizing all that vinyl – by genre, alphabetically, popularity…

Ditto for tape cassettes. CDs could be stacked in slotted towers or on a book shelf, and organized in whatever way worked for you. Even though all that old technology took up physical space, there was something real about it. It was all tangible. You could walk into a room and immediately know how big your collection is and how many songs you own in each genre.

Then, better technology came along. No more stacks of crates to haul around. We have computers, record pools to subscribe to and USBs on which to store our music.

But, with every step forward, there’s at least one step back. We can now own thousands of songs without worrying about where to store them. We can save them all onto USBs and easily plug them into our portable laptop and take our collection anywhere. The problem, though, is how do you organize all those songs?

Here’s what you need to do: organize your music the same way that you used to organize it when you were dealing with vinyl. My suggestion is to group songs according to your gigs. Make sure that you add in enough songs to cover you for at least double the time you’ll actually be DJing.

Start by creating playlists in Rekordbox. Once you’ve got those organized, it’s easy to transfer which ever set of songs you plan to use onto a USB stick. Check that you’ve tagged and indexed each song properly so that you’ll be able to flip through songs quickly and easily when you’re on the spot.

Remember that old saying, the best laid plans…? Take heed. If you’ve played enough gigs, you know that things don’t always go as planned. Add a second file of songs to that USB so you’ll be ready no matter what happens.

The key to being organized is making sure you give yourself the time to set up the system beforehand. You’ve got a lot of music. Don’t expect to be able to find everything you want at a moment’s notice unless you’ve put in the work ahead of time. How long will it take? The answer depends entirely on how large your collection is and how many different kinds of playlists you want to create. But understand that the effort is well worth it!