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Backing Up and File Management

This part can be very, very painstaking it's sometimes not the glamorous part of the dream, but is it absolutely essential, especially when we talk about in a digital landscape that we all operated? Now this I mentioned last last section, how my laptop decided to not want to work today and actually the guys, they're still figuring out what's exactly going on there, but apparently think it is a hard drive failure of some kind, which fits perfectly until what we're talking about today. So, um, yeah, it's interesting, I'm running a solid state drive in my mac book air, and it decided to not want tio play nice, so we'll see what happens, but first point being that you should be backing up your library, so, um, I know that that's a very, um, that that's a common sense rule to make sure you're back in your stuff, but I think especially when it comes to music and this is like your livelihood and or, you know, I mean, this is your music collection, which you've like spent hours and months and ...

years collecting to them for it all to be gone simply because you didn't back up your drive like that's unfortunate, you know, and that should never really happened, so there's two types of backups right in this day and age is you can use a physical hard drive a physical external hard drive to back up your drive there's a ton of other software that exists out there that will I sort of do this automatically that you can install in your computer and run for those of you who are mac users apple users you can use a time machine as a backup which will sort of automatically back your computer up when you connected toe wifi at your house or what not again I'm not here to tell you what the right way is to do it my only thing is to recommend to you that you do use a backup system whatever that is that it was completely up to you and nowadays hard drives have become so much cheaper and storage has become so much cheaper I'm actually do have a flash drive on me that is one hundred twenty eight gigs um on a usb flash drive that I actually have all my music backed up on that one drive or all the music that I um perform with so thank god that I did do that before this hulk of task for this morning because I can walk around here okay knowing that my music is still with me otherwise you probably would not see me on screen right now I'd be on the floor crying about how my music is all gone so um we're going tio talk about not only backing up um but also file management and sort of the way that you, um, the strategy that you put together two managing your files that you know exactly where each follows that have any of you here in studio ever had a a moment in which you were looking for a file and you can't find it like you're not sure what dr it's on you don't know where that came from? Okay, so, um, I actually I want to share this with you because I just found this really cool service that exists out there called gobbler, so if you look up gobbler, just gobbler dot com, they have this really interesting service where, um they will you can plug in a hard drive, it will analyze the hard drive look for any sort of creative type of files so well, if you're like unable to live user, it'll now look for in a less file or any of your session files. Um, it'll look for mp three's and look for waves, photoshopped files and stuff in other categories to look for and then you can start to tag your work so you can add in tags on each file and things like that as well so that then you can pull this up a lot easier. The coolest part about this, though, is that you could disconnect the hard drive after it's been analyzed by gobbler, you can disconnect the hard drive connected another hard drive and it would analyze that other hard drive as well and then without the hard drives even being plugged in you could search for a file and it would tell you exactly which hard drive it was on what folder it's sitting in and then you could go back and get it so to me that seems like a really, really great way to do it. I'm now starting to move like my world into that world so that I can have everything tag and I can know that if I'm looking for this to just be able to type it in and four to pull up without me having to constantly like, is it on this drive? No, not in this dry visit on this tribe um, so that saves a lot of times I want to share it with you guys and then the other thing that it does, it does offer the service of backup so cloud storage also, so but like I said there's a ton of options I use drop box a lot for my, um for my backup um I don't use drop box for every single piece of like music that I have, but for all of the important stuff I'll back upon dropbox also back up on a physical hard drive um I'm starting back up using gobbler back upon time machine I have like multiple backups so um probably a good idea in terms of the backups out find what works for you uh you know, obviously some of these things do cost money so find what? What is the most cost effective way for you and what makes the most sense for you but it's definitely worth all of that tobacco so I'm going to actually go to my laptop right now are not mine topped likely I have my assistant traveling with me and I'm using his laptop. Thanks, david appreciate this. Let me, um tractor open let me quit tractor real quick all right, so let's do this let's let's talk itunes really quick so I'm gonna pull up itunes any of you other use itunes? Yes. Yes kind of sort of yes. Ok. Cool. So itunes has become, uh a centerpiece. I think for a lot of people in terms of their music experience the way they listen to music the way they consume music itunes is definitely one of those, you know, more common pieces of software that people are utilizing. There is a lot of misconception though, around itunes and what itunes is doing so I'll often hear from somebody if I said to you like, where is where do you havethe e brooke on the bradshaw regular francine bradshaw record where is that record at and somebody will say well, it's in the itunes it's not really in itunes though like itunes is reading from where the location of that file is actually at itunes is not of physical place itunes does have itunes folders and occasionally you may have run into this where um ok, where is that francine bradshaw record it's in itunes it's really in artist francine bradshaw album unknown here's the file that's the way that like itunes categorizes their music and organizes the music so it can be confusing though, and I just want to point out a couple of things he's this more so tips this isn't going to be an itunes seminar unlike all the ins and outs of itunes or anything like that but I do want to share with you a couple of like things that I've come across things that I've realized on notice over the time that I've spent like trying to organize my library so actually I'm going to start from from scratch so I'm going to go and um by the way, this is not a bad idea to talk um to talk about like record pools and things like that to like, I know it's not exactly the same his file management but you know it's also the consumption of this is anybody in here belong to a record pool does anybody know what a record pool is? Okay, cool I mean, this is good this is good this is good is good that we're talking about this um so I'll give you a little quick brief history about like a record pool on how it existed and why it's called the record pool so when I was when I had started d j and I mentioned this to you guys before it was in the sort of the era when most records came on vinyl, right? So you go to the record store there were a lot more record stores at the time you would go, uh releases we come out like on a friday or like on a monday or a tuesday or whatever you go to the record store, you get your twelve inch single your vinyl you're twelve and single or like an album or what not and you come home and you'd start like working with that music and the label's um well actually couldn't tell you what came first, but um a record pool was set up record pools were set up to be able to service records to influential djs so especially like guys on the radio, more high profile djs, djs that had the ability to get the record and push the record a lot farther for promotional use more than anything that the record companies the labels saw value in that and like well yeah, I mean like these guys then shouldn't pay for these records and if we can get influential guys to spin our records by giving them our records like that seems like it would make sense so these record pools were set up in that way of then like you would huge subscribed to a record pool the records would come in you even have like your own little cubby inbox you'd come into the the record pool office you pick up your records you have to give some feedback on on each record you know, like I rate this record of four out of five uh I like the I like the hook don't really care for the third verse in this or like, you know, I really like the way that this sounds what you'd write these things down and give this feedback to the record label um and then you know, hopefully the idea would be that you'd play this record well obviously with the with record with vinyl records kind of going away a bit the record pools now have moved online so there's quite a few record online record polls that are out there um dad if you're and and also the exclusivity of the record labels of the record pools has changed a bit now that it's not physical copies so like when a record pool would only have they would only get a box of thirty records well, then you can't have thirty one members and only have thirty records, right? So you there have to be then on lee thirty members to then everybody gets a a record type of thing. So, um, anyway, is now in the digital era that's not an issue anymore, like you can have unlimited files there. So one of the things that I want to just pull up, you log here if I type in d j record pool, direct heard pool, this is what pulls up, so there are a ton of these record pose that exist out there, um and each one is going to be a little bit different. Most of stuff that you're going to find in a record pool is is newer music meant for promotions? Um, but there are a few out there that offer sort of some older tracks a cz well, but the idea here, really more than anything is like the promotion of records and like you'll see in a lot of the pools that you'll get remixes in the pools, you'll get instrumental versions of tracks, often with a lot of these record pools, though there'll be another d j or producer out there who has created a a new easier intro like a instrumental intro at the front end of a track. So we talked about this a little bit yesterday in terms of, like, you know, some songs are going to have, like, a clean intro on the beginning of it, we looped that one here earlier, the m c lyte track we loop that intro, but like, what I could do is I could go in and actually build that out and then save it as, like, an eight bar intro and then send it to like a record pool. And they could then put this up to be able to share with other record pool members. So probably a good idea in the way that it works is you pay a monthly subscription. Most of pools work this way, you don't pay per download because that would be illegal. Um, or that would be, then paint her down the would be illegal. It would just be that, you know, that would be the same way, like an itunes works or amazon or be porterson point that, but in this case, your you have access to a larger pool of music u down the what you want, and you need to rate and comment on everything that you download and then it's meant for promotional purposes so it shouldn't be though that like you know you're then taking all of this that you've downloaded and then now you go and start your own little site and start you know, broadcasting this stuff out there I mean it's meant for you to consume as it as a d j and usually there's a screening process so we have a question from d j electra wants to know about compression rates for for files is so forget downloading what's an ideal size to have in your life story ok, so this is a good this is a good time to talk about that in the me um let me yeah absolutely absolutely in the meat let me close the loop here on this on this record pool thing and then I want to do I do want to talk about that though, so I I want to bring you up to speed on like, sort of let me pull up a record pull that I use I use a site called deejay city dot com good friends of mine over there um and so this is this is their record pool you'll see that there's here is like the top record pulled tracks uh let me log in really quick also a couple of other pools that are out there another one that I use is um my friends have read the b junkies just started there um record pool and you'll find a lot of like some older tracks on the on this site so they kind of see like brothers johnson stomp like ok like you're not going to get that in a lot of other pools so like you confined that though on the beach junkies pool so you'll see like the difference between these two and they're meant to be if you guys don't see my password at home all right now okay, so like in the beach junkies pool you're going to get, um here's some of the categories of music uh but you see like r and b funk and disco classic um an eighties hip hop and trap golden era hip hop like a lot more of like hip hop funk disco scratch tools um you know, some commercial stuff um cool and then and then with d j city go to the record pool here and what I'm gonna do is I'm actually walk through how I would download a track I'm gonna download a track we'll see we'll look at the bit rate of it too will pop it into itunes I'll go through the whole process of how like how this is working and how to organize this music then so here's the different genres when it comes to like the stuff that's on d j city so there's a larger house elektronik section here dub step drum bass pop rock armed be other um there's a lot of stuff that's in here so you know the way this works let's take a ah I'm not gonna play any of these songs I'm just going to download something so let's take a song sure somebody jae seo here to review this so I would play it listen to it and then I can review it so let's say I'm going to review this right now ministates cole I've actually heard this work before I download it right ok. So hit download now it's downloading so this is going to down them for most of you your default is that it's going to download into your downloads folder? All right, so this is really important terms the management too is that like you're then not just leaving it in downloads and then putting it into like your software because then all of your music then is just gonna be in downloads and all of your music is going to be scattered all all around um they come downloading this is taking quite a while here. Ok? We'll wait for that to download and in the meantime yet say you did have like hundreds of songs downloaded would that one pro service you mentioned earlier be able to help you organize a ton of stuff that's kind of scattered everywhere? Yeah, I mean it'll tell you where things are it's not going to move things for you, okay you know, you will tell you where things are located though, and then I mean it's probably a good idea, you know, I would probably say it's probably good ideas a rule of thumb like at least every six months to maybe go through your computer and kind of clean things up and do sort of a spring cleaning on your computer maybe take some stuff off that you don't need, you know, one of the things that I see d days sometimes using external hard drives and d jane with external hard drives, which to me is is always kind of like it gives me anxiety to see, like, somebody who's like d jane with, like an external hard drive, like taped to the back of a laptop or like hanging off the side of the laptop somehow, like I'm so afraid that, like in a moments notice your leader pull that out by accident, it'll drop the hard drive will fail like something will go go on there and, like, for the most part, I know that the guys who are doing that are doing that because they want more storage. Um, what I would really recommend is like two to try and partition your music tohave music that, like, I definitely deejay with on a consistent basis and this is that music and I'm going to store that on the laptop or wherever you decide to store okay, so this interesting right? So this just downloaded and then it instantly played in itunes right? Like right when it finished downloading now that's an actual setting you can change that if you want so that it doesn't pop up in play but it has already started and played in itunes that me search for this thing here I can't do it by by the way you can change all of these fields here control click and give me all these different columns so like beats per minute might be a cool thing to know um even inside of itunes date added all right, so I can like now search for date added and there it is right away so just using these different fields in these different comments I mean that these different columns can be really helpful. I can also get rid of stuff that I don't use. I know a ton of people that use the rating star rating system I personally don't use it, but I know that there are people out there that use that I can definitely search through their library by number of stars or even as they're playing live to be like oh that's a five star a song like that's a higher rating song like I know that that's going work on like I'm looking for a hit, you know I'm maybe losing the floor a little bit. I need like that hit record like, where is that hit record? Sort of buy rating on not only inside of itunes, but if I go teo, open up tractor since we didn't give ah tractor too much of a nod earlier to this morning, um, you can see here inside of track, their tractor has this star rating system that's basically the same as itunes, so you know that's a field. A lot of the fields that are in itunes are duplicated in the d j software, so what's. Nice, then, is that everything. When you change something in surat or in tractor to the file that is data that is meta data that is stored on the actual mp three, it'll change in anything that you open up. So when you open up tractor, if you changed it in cerrado, you open up tractor that will then be changed. If you open up itunes, that will be changed.