Library & iTunes

[deanobirko]

Hi there

I do a lot of gigs, half are house / dance gigs and the others are pop type disco things. If I use Cross to play rubbish pop songs from my iTunes library, how do I stop them auto-adding to the main library?

I have my music highly organised in my library its ALL house music, with no pop.

How can I stop anything i play from iTunes library automatically adding itself to the main library?

[DJ Vintage]

I am not sure it can. After all, the software keeps track of tracks played and such. It does not transfer your tracks to another location or anything. They do stay within iTunes.

You might try a workaround by making your House only collection your main collection and having a copy of that under a different collection name that you use when also using iTunes tracks.
At startup just open the House only collection to always have a clean collection.

[RoJeC]

You can't block this. Cross needs the entry in the collection to store analysis results and cue/loops info.

One of the default smartlist is 'recently added'. This may be an other way to quickly remove tracks after each gig.

[Stormcaller]

Put all the house in one playlist. Use that instead of "all tracks", or make sure all your house has the correct genre tags and use a smart playlist to manage them.

If you just use "all tracks" all the time it is going to get more and more unmanagable as your collection increases. DJ libraries are living beasts of things that will take over everything given half a chance, so having everything in dedicated playlists will make your life easier in the long run.

[RoJeC]

Following stormcaller's advice you can drag the list to the nodedock left for quick access.
If you put the node on top Cross will open with this list as a default.

[DJ Vintage]

As for DJ collections ... keep yours tight, don't fall into the digital hoarding trap!

Some of the best DJs I know have 600-1000 track collections. I've adapted their 1 in/1 out strategy. Adding no more than 2-5 tracks a month and making sure they replace something else.

If you then "pack a crate" before every gig (like you used to do with CD's/vinyl) you will have a very focussed set.

More, in this case, definitely doesn't equal better, imho.