Digital Audio storage solutions

   

Hey guys,

I work in alot of top 40 style music clubs, but also play a few gigs which are genre specific (usualy electro house/breaks)....so i have a huge range of music. Currently my Mp3 collection is all burnt on CD as i get them, usually filling up a cd with 70 or so tracks. I then print out a list of what is contained on each cd.

Each cd has subfolders containing specific genres. I usually burn as mp3 @ 320kbs and do not notice a sound differnce when playing.

The problem is now that I have a whole range of mp3 cds, containting all of my music but, its getting to complicated to find specific tracks, without filing through heaps of paper to find out what cd it is on.

Has anyone got any suggestions that will allow me to carry a large range of music, but also allow for quick location of music, and specific types of tracks (for diffenent dancefloor moods)

any suggesstions would be appreciated.

Don't use folders on your CD's. Use a cd per genre. This will save some work. Perhaps you can sort the tracks by artist. Then you only need to search for an artist. And when you order your cd's on the alphabeth it should be easy to find.

I use printable CD's and use a HP printer to print some information on the fornt of the disc... it helps me a lot.

I categorize (only real audio CD) per music genre, and from each genre I have disc, baiscally they are roughly sorted by tempo (BPM). Each disc contains 9 to 11 tracks.

Since Lead has already covered the organisational part, here's the technological bit. Depending on your budget and preferences, there are a few options.

- Finalscratch solution: You hook a laptop with finalscratch, serato, or similar software up to a set of turntables/CD players and carry your entire collection on it, possibly with an external harddrive.







- HD Player option: there are many different companies that are offering HD players. These players upload the music into an internal harddisc and allow you to play them back without having to carry around the CDs. Some of the more common ones are Denon's HD2500, Numark's D2 director, the Cortex HDC series, and ofcourse the infamous (and in my humble oppinion amazing) Numark HDX's. You can generally hook a keyboard up to these players to facilitate searching.







- The ipod solution: *shiver* please don't...








If you have a lot (and by that i mean A LOT) of money, perhaps you should look into A&H's Xone:3D or 2D's, but as this is more in the MIDI field I'll leave it up to someone that has more knowledge on that topic than i do to explain it. And if you're just filthy rich and aching to get rid of money as quickly as possible for the convenience of not having to look through CD's you can always burn your MP3's on a DVD (you'll be able to fit a good 1000 tracks on a single DVD) and play them back on some DVJ-1000's.






Perhaps if you give an idea of your budget i can flesh out in more detail. Also, is this just for home use, or for on the road?