I know that Playlists give you specific Order of Play, but is it easier just to use playlists for all the organizing instead of collection crates. It seems that more actual work is done by the computer with crates (duplicating files etc)?
How does everyone use them?
My recommendation is to use Itunes, it is the best way to organize the music and then import it into serato, engine prime or any other program in exactly the same order, whether you import it as a crate or playlist, it also gives you the advantage that if dj software changes is almost 100% sure that this will be able to import and you will not have to do all that work again, anyway in engine you can drag the song to the position you want or use the option to change the order number, in my experience if you import serato direct for example this does not respect the order in which you have the songs in your crates, the procedure I use is the following in engine prime I update the serato collection only to import cue etc and then update the of iTunes and import them directly from itunes that already contain the order and the metadata like cue etc. obtained from serato regards
Using Itunes also enables you to loose access to your crates in your DJ software when apple changes something in itunes and breakes compatibility (happened before). There are always downsides, beware of them.
As a long time Apple user I can certainly confirm this. In fact, the MacBook I play out with hasn’t seen an update since Yosemite for just that reason. It all works perfectly, I ain’t touchin’ nothin’!
Is there a Gap in the market for an open source library management tool that all mainstream software can use.
Something like the Ableton Link of Library management
On the flip i say most people just stick with one software and will probably switch a couple of times in their entire DJ career.
Something like XML as implemented by Rekordbox but a faster one.
It took me a week to import a Rekordbuddy created XML (serato to Rekordbox conversion)