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Thread: How to set up music for VDJ. Internal or external storage?

  1. #1
    Dinosaur Excalibur's Avatar
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    Default How to set up music for VDJ. Internal or external storage?

    As you may know, Lucifer* has my soul for another three years, in exchange for a shiny new laptop. With 2Tb of storage.
    I'd like to know how best to utilise this. My current ones have small drives, and necessitate the use of external drives, and it's easy. In VDJ, click computer, click the drive letter you want, and you're ready to Rock and Roll.

    If I decide to use the massive HD on the new one, it will free up an USB port, which would be a bonus, and one less thing dangling off it, cluttering up the deckstand. My confusion is, where do I put this music, and how do I name it? Can I find " My Music " with VDJ? Should I create a folder labelled with something like Disco Music?

    Laptop's Windows 10, if that makes any odds. Thanks.


    * For Lucifer, read PC World.
    Excalibur. Older than the average DJ.

    www.excaliburmobiledisco.co.uk

  2. #2

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    If you can easily point VDJ at a drive, I would imagine you should just as easily be able to point it at a folder. Just navigate to where the music is as usual when you're telling VDJ about your sources.

    If you're going to put all your DJ music in one place on the 2TB disked laptop I'd suggest not using your 'my music' folder - keep it somewhere that only VDJ will know about (because despite your best intentions, Windows Media Mangler can 'helpfully' download metadata for you & mess things up). Make a new folder with a name of your own devising - copy music to it & point VDJ at that. Exactly where you put it & how you name it is really up to you. When I still used Windows for DJing I had all my music in a directory in the root partition of the drive.. i.e. C:\DJ\Music (and following on from there subfolders for albums & decades etc).

    I only opt out of the whole Windows 'music' folder thing because I spend a lot of time preening my music metadata (tags etc) & I don't want anything messing with it but me. Call me pedantic but I still prefer to tag tracks with the year they were relevant (first released, generally), not the year they appeared on album X.. and genres... don't get me started on those

  3. #3
    ukpartydj's Avatar
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    I use the internal drive.
    Never had an issue and it's much faster than external in most cases.

    All my music is in the music folder... Ahhh! No problems yet though.

    Dorset DJ - Dorset based DJ service
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  4. #4
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    All my music is in iTunes.

    I make all my playlists in iTunes then just open them in VDJ on the laptop. All my music is stored in iTunes Match so I have duplicate copies on the reserve laptop, the iPad and phone. So there are 4 copies of my music collection and a copy in the cloud.

    Never used an external drive.

  5. #5
    Dinosaur Excalibur's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by DJColsie View Post
    All my music is in iTunes.
    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa rgh. Ain't gonna happen, end of.

    Juski, your advice tallies with my numpty ideas, which is always a good thing. Thanks.
    Excalibur. Older than the average DJ.

    www.excaliburmobiledisco.co.uk

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    Quote Originally Posted by Excalibur View Post
    Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa rgh. Ain't gonna happen, end of.

    Juski, your advice tallies with my numpty ideas, which is always a good thing. Thanks.
    You're quite welcome Peter. I don't let anything near my DJ music library for lots of good reasons, which is why I keep things separate. I just don't trust ANY other software not to mangle the metadata I painstakingly tweak. By storing your music in a folder suggested by the operating system (in your case, Windows), that means if you inadvertently open a file or folder with the wrong program it might want to start fettling the data it finds there.

    Even the program I play out with (Mixxx) doesn't write tags into files. Once they're set, they're staying that way.

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    DazzyD's Avatar
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    Peter, I did this very thing back in August when I got my new laptop with a 1.5Tb internal HDD.

    What I did, and it's easy as pie, was to partition the drive. I now have partitions for the OS, music, karaoke and video. Now everything is internal which, as you say, frees up a USB port, but it also speeds up loading of tracks, too. My external drive had a tendency to go to sleep quicker under Win10 than it did with Win7 which resulted in delays in loading tracks sometimes. Now that's not an issue.

    If you're only using the laptop for DJing, I'd highly recommend keeping your media internal. I'm glad I did!
    Dazzy D
    Lightning Disco & Entertainment

    Born to make you party!

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    Quote Originally Posted by DazzyD View Post
    Peter, I did this very thing back in August when I got my new laptop with a 1.5Tb internal HDD.

    What I did, and it's easy as pie, was to partition the drive. I now have partitions for the OS, music, karaoke and video. Now everything is internal which, as you say, frees up a USB port, but it also speeds up loading of tracks, too. My external drive had a tendency to go to sleep quicker under Win10 than it did with Win7 which resulted in delays in loading tracks sometimes. Now that's not an issue.

    If you're only using the laptop for DJing, I'd highly recommend keeping your media internal. I'm glad I did!
    I was going to suggest partitioning the drive, but these days it's not strictly necessary & it can be tricky (not to mention risky) with a live OS on the drive. Fine if you don't mind reinstalling Windows (something I generally do with every new machine to get rid of all the OEM crud) though

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    DazzyD's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by juski View Post
    I was going to suggest partitioning the drive, but these days it's not strictly necessary & it can be tricky (not to mention risky) with a live OS on the drive. Fine if you don't mind reinstalling Windows (something I generally do with every new machine to get rid of all the OEM crud) though
    With Win10 I didn't find it risky at all. And I didn't have to reinstall anything. It was merely a case of using Windows inbuilt drive management tool to shrink the large partition to little more than is needed by the OS then turn the "stripey" space in to a new partition. Then, shrink that partition and repeat until you have all the required "drives" that you need. It was really easy to do - a complete doddle.

    It's not necessary but, for the purposes of VDJ, you can actually assign the drive letters to the partitions that you used on the external HDD and then copy the original media over to your new partitions and VDJ will automatically recognise your media as it did before without having to recurse your library. For example, my external drive had letters M, N and X. I assigned these letters to my new partitions and copied the relevant media from the external HDD to the relevant partitions on the internal drive so the entire tree structure was the same (in the eyes of VDJ, anyway). And it works fine for me!
    Dazzy D
    Lightning Disco & Entertainment

    Born to make you party!

  10. #10

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    I use 'My Music' folder and then just make sub folders under that. It all appears in the directory section in VDJ. BUT I do back up my music monthly to an external drive, with a download of the VDJ programme, so if the laptop fails, I can get my spare out and away I go. USB3 speed is as quick if not quicker than most laptop hard drives. Desktops are slightly faster but only by about 12% , plus as an absolute emergency, I always have a lead plugged into the mixer that my phone can play music if needed.

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