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

[Excalibur]

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.

[Nakatomi]

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

[ukpartydj]

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.

[DJColsie]

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.

[Excalibur]

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.

[Nakatomi]

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.