SwingDJs

Mike wrote:I just recently finished reorganizing my entire CD collection in strict autobiographical order; that is, the order I personally bought them in over the last eight years.

yeah, i used to organize my mixes like that.

I just re-organized my stuff, first by category and then alphabeticly. If one CD has multiple categories it is filed by the songs I play most often.

My categoires are:

Early big band era
Late big band era
Big band post ww2
Groove sounds
Jazz, other dancable jazz
Blues(other then big band blues)
R&B/Jive/early rock/jump blues
other(everything else)

I've been organizing my mp3's into the following categories:

Swing Era
Post Swing Era

The Post Swing Era is then divided into several categories: big band, jazz, jump blues, vocalists, etc.

I have yet to use this system while DJing, so I don't know how it works. I also don't have a very large collection, so it may need further rehauls later on.

I find it interesting that a lot of people organize alphabetically. I started organizing chronologically, then by artist. So the Charleston/hot jazz stuff is first, then swing era, post swing era, modern, with special breakouts for neo, blues and soul.

The compilations go where the majority of songs fall - i.e. Ken Burns Basie and Ellington in swing era even though they cover a large time chunk.

This has helped me start learning the liturgy (a classical music term for the body of music - useful here?).

The downside is that I have to remember to flip to the back for LCJO!

I'm only at about 100 CDs though so it will be interesting to see how well this system holds up as my collection grows.

I'm at about 400, and often times I have to find stuff quick that's why the alphabetic order. I also have allot of compilations that cover mulitple years so I would not even know where to put them if I was in chronological order.

Roy wrote:I'm at about 400, and often times I have to find stuff quick that's why the alphabetic order. I also have allot of compilations that cover mulitple years so I would not even know where to put them if I was in chronological order.

makes sense - also if you know your collection well alphabetical will probably be quickest.

Okay, I know I'm a geek, but I just had to share this. I'm organizing all my music on my laptop, and one of the features Windows XP has is that you can put pictures onto all of the folders. So in my "Swing Era" folder, I have pictures of each artist on their folder. It's so cool.

Now that I own my own laptop, one thing I'm slowly working on is organizing a database of all the music in my collection.

There's many things like lenght, period, artist, bpm, you name it, it's there. My goal is to be able to do a query in case I'm stuck for a song. It will also have information on where the cds are and such. Just a good way of keeping things organized. I hope to one day not need to use it as I hope to know my collection enough to not need it. But until then I think it could be a helpful tool.

Harrison

I, too, have been thinking about creating a database. I don't have the need, yet, but that'll probably change soon. I'd love to be able to use my ideas as query terms ("I want something from era X, by musician Y, with vocalist Z, about 165bpm, that feels very smooth...").

I archive my music (78rpm, 7", 10" , LP's) alpabeticly as follows:

country
record label
artist(s)

if i have more then 50 records of a label:
music type
year or release date


this works fine for me as i always can remember the record label.

V-Rocket wrote:I archive my music (78rpm, 7", 10" , LP's) alpabeticly as follows:

country
...

Ya, but I usually leave my country music at home when I DJ a swing event.