How to Organize and Schedule Music
The way you organize and schedule your music can really make you stand out as a DJ. Here, we’ll cover the technical aspects of creating your mix.
First, we recommend reading the following Help Documents:
Before You Start
You need to already have an idea in your head of the kind of music you want to play and how well the tracks you want to play will mix with each other. For a little inspiration, visit Spacial’s Forum and ask other DJs how they made those kinds of decisions when they got started.
Organize Your Music
Start by creating categories in SAM DJ that make sense to you. We recommend category names that point to a common attribute, like “Hits,” “Electronica,” or “Reggae.”
Once you’ve created the categories you want, drag and drop media files into these categories. It doesn’t matter if the same file gets dropped into multiple categories.
Format Your Playlist
Now you have to decide how you’re going to arrange your music.
For the sake of example, let’s pretend you’re DJing an event where your audience expects to hear hits from then and now:
80s Hits
Top 40
90s Hits
00s Hits
Oldies
To do this, set up your schedule’s logic as follows (read the “clockwheel rotation” Help Document for more information):
80s Hits [Least Recently Played Artist]
Top 40 [Weighted]
90s Hits [Least Recently Played Artist]
Station ID [Random, NoRules]
Top 40 [Weighted]
00s Hits [Least Recently Played Artist]
Top40 [Random]
Oldies [Least Recently Played Artist]
Station ID [Random, NoRules]
In this example, Top 40 songs are “Weighted,” which means they’re prioritized over other tracks so they’re played more frequently. This kind of logic will evenly distribute your Top 40 tunes.
You’ll also note that we marked that last Top 40 track as “Random” to avoid having tracks play in the same order each time (this sort of thing comes up with “Weighted” rotations).
We marked songs from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s as “Least Recently Played Artists” to ensure a good musical balance.
We used “Random” logic for station identification because we only have a few files in this category. In addition, when there are only a few items in any given category, it’s important to disable separation rules. If you don’t, SAM DJ will not select Station IDs because it won’t be able to find any that don’t break separation rules.
This is part of the “clockwheel rotation” process. You can create many clockwheels and save them to file. Use the Event Scheduler to create a new clockwheel for different parts of the day or week.
