iPod DJing

Organizing music for DJing on an iPod

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The software for an iPod essentially organizes your music, however if you plan on DJing music on your iPod, you’ll need to consider the limitations and features of iTunes and the iPod and use these to your advantage. Good organization helps when you DJ. Lucky for you here is a decent solution for anyone looking to DJ with an iPod.

First, before moving any further there is one key aspect that needs to be considered: an iPod and the iPod software doesn’t yet allow you as a DJ to alter the pitch on its own, whilst there is DJ equipment that allows you to alter pitch, the iPod itself and iTunes doesn’t currently have a feature to do this, after all this would requre the software to edit the structure of the track. there is however a slight work around, we’ll look at that later.

To organize music on an iPod, you need to look at iTunes. An iPod, stores music naturally in groups, these are as follows:

Artists

Albums

Songs

Genres

Composers

(and podcasts and audiobooks, but we won’t need this)

If you are using the iPod to play music, then usually using the Album group is fine. Now, for the organization.

You can get tools that help you to identify the BPM (Beats per minute) of tracks, these include: beatunes for iTunes on Mac and this manual application, there are loads out there. now once every single track you have has BPM, you want to create Playlists in iTunes, the easiest way to do this is to use the Smart Playlist set the limit range, ie the BPM, now the groups in the playlist section of your iPod contain tracks by BPM.

Next, if you wish to setup other playlists on your iPod, you want to make sure they are allocated a number, by labeling the BPM related playlists as BPM 130, and your normal playlists as 1. xyz when you search through playlists on your iPod you’ll find the BPM playlists grouped together.

With in the playlist, iTunes allows you to dictate the order of your tracks, this is a great opportunity to think about how to order your tracks.

With this your iPod, now allows you to select playlists based on BPM, album, song, artist, and genre. when you are organizing your music, make sure that you enter this information into iTunes.