Richie Hawtin: how to organize a digital music collection

Richie Hawtin: how to organize a digital music collection

16 July, 2008 | 10.34AM

• Section: Music News Topics: Beatport Blog, Cocoon, Technology
• Written by: Industry Boy

How does Richie Hawtin, one of the biggest techno DJs in the world, organize his expansive digital music collection?

Beatportal caught up with Richie Hawtin in Ibiza before his set at Cocoon in Amnesia to find out.

“I organize my music in folders on my computer labeled by the date that they are transferred onto my performance harddrive, sometimes using an event name also in the folder name,” says Richie Hawtin.

“At the beginning of the year I start out with about three or four new folders but now there are about 26 folders which is making things a lot harder.

“There’s nothing worse than knowing what you want to play but not being able to find it.”

Can Hawtin think of a better solution for organizing a digital music collection?

“Keywords or tags like ‘house’, ‘techno’, ‘min bomb’ etc. used to work well, but with the ever increasing amount of digital releases these are just not cutting it,” reckons Richie.

“The original Final Scratch system was able to preview album covers but usually only if you had scanned them by hand since most of the mp3s at this point did not have embedded artwork.

“Since this feature was rarely used it seemed to have disappeared in the updates of that type of software, but thankfully it is getting a new lease on life with most mp3s now having embedded artwork and ideas like ‘coverflow’ coming back into use.

“So in this way, the artwork associated with releases and/or individual digital music files is now, once again, becoming extremely important for the digital performer. 

“The only way to really keep on top of all the music these days is multiple levels of organization and it’s good to go back and revisit the music from time to time to reorganize and restructure.

“I’ve got a backpack full of demo CDs and USB sticks from Sonar and it would be disappointing not to go through them before tonight’s set at Cocoon, but honestly, we’d like to stop accepting demos on physical carriers as sometimes it is more time consuming to transfer files or load CDs into your computer than it takes to listen to them.

“From March to June so much new music comes out in that period and it’s easy to miss some real gems, so it’s important to keep going through your folders revisiting the music that you have just in case there’s something you missed the first time around.

“Electronic music shouldn’t just be about the last two weeks of releases, but it sometimes ends up being like that because the ‘new’ always seems more interesting or end up popping up to the top of your searches during a performance.”

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