Transition between two personal collections

fotispirou

I have been using tractor pro since 2010 when I already had a quite large music collection, but lately it has become even larger exceeding 103.000 tracks!

I started with a 500Gb disc and now I am on an 4Tb USB 3.0 external HDD mostly filled with flacs. Although I experience a tiny lag when I load a track into decks, my M1 Macbook Pro has no problem dealing with my collection. But since on my dj gigs I use no more than 250 tracks, I though I might shrink my collection for my live sets. That’s why I bought a High-Speed SSD Storage & 10-In-1 Hub with an NVMe SSD Enclosure. In order to avoid buying an 4tb ssd which is quite expensive, I thought that I could buy an 1tb instead and fill it with my mostly used and necessary music files.

My question is this:

Is there an easy way to switch between two collections, one large and one small without messing with file consistency? In that case, would I have to keep the same folder structure on both discs? Meaning that I would keep traktor’s music folder intact and delete all the unnecessary files in the 1tb ssd.

Is there another way? Or a proper way?😍

wayfinder

i don't think there's a built-in function to do this specifically, but what you can do is set up traktor so that your library and root dir etc. all point to a specific drive name, and then assign that drive name to the directory that contains the collection you want to work with before you start traktor. it should read the files correctly from either, if they were made with the same version. therein lies the rub, however - updating traktor. i don't know if it's possible to update it twice, once for each collection? because you'd need to update both collections. and since updating traktor with a nonstandard root dir location is not a nice experience even when there's just one of them, this is not something i'd personally look forward to. but that's how I would do it if i had to keep separate collections.

however!

it might be a better fit for your use case to keep JUST the small collection in traktor and only have the extended set of tracks living outside it. you can configure traktor to store most information in the mp3 files so that when you need to re-add something to the working set, the data is there.

Dj-Eric T

hi the flac file are to large and i have converted all to 128 - 441 i use dbpoweramp to convert the files

to a format that works saving loads of space and works well well.

fotispirou

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/126368#Comment_126368

Thank you for your suggestion, but flacs are large for a reason, which is quality.

fotispirou

If someone could explain what happens when you add another collection to traktor, I think it might help me.

Kubrak

You may switch collections. Just load collection desired. But it takes time to process. And each collection has its own set of playlists.

I do not switch collections back and forth, but few times it has happened that something went wrong and collection used was "corrupted" (missing playlists, missing tracks in playlists, maybe more....), so I have been forced to load one of backup collections that Traktor aumatically makes.

So, what you desire might work. The only question is, how long it takes to switch.

wayfinder

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/126500#Comment_126500

This is why i wrote what I wrote above. Switching the contents of the directory does not re-import the collection, so there's no additional time that switching would take

Kubrak

Switching content of directory could probably work, but one has to try to be sure....

If the info is also stored in tracks one would have to synchronize the content and so on. IMHO, if one is not cautious and precise in synchonizing the content, he would run sooner or later into the problem....

Just try, and you will see. I guess Traktor does not have the possibility to switch collection without rescanning on reason....

Maybe it would be better to install Traktor twice..., but still consistency would be problem....

Only if you have smaller set of tracks on PC and the rest on PC or external disc, it could work fine.

wayfinder

yeah, it would be difficult to keep the two collections in sync. as i said, it might be better to only keep the smaller set as a collection, and draw from the larger set as needed