The most important info for your music is GENRE

Why?

Because then you can always find and organise your tunes no matter what happens to your playlists and crates.

All MP3s and AIFFs have a genre field and you can easily fill it in using iTunes.
Once you have done that, you can organise all your tunes by genre simply by clicking the top of the genre column in iTunes or Serato.

From there you can easily create crates for Serato or playlists for iTunes.

You can also use smart playlists to great effect:-

e.g.

1. Create smart playlist
2. Call it "house - tech"
3. Use the rules "genre" contains "house - tech"

And magically every time you add a new tech house tune to iTunes it will appear in the house - tech playlist in Serato and iTunes

I seriously recommend storing all your files in appropriate genre folders too. Really helps if you use a different computer, change your file locations, or just want to find the files quicker. This is the system I use.....

1. Download new track to the desktop
2. Move the track to the appropriate genre folder. In my case this is F:(external drive) and then /house - tech, /house - funky or whatever
3. Play the track in iTunes
4. Put ALL the proper info in the right places (track, artist, genre, comments, year)
5. Open Serato and add it to a crate if required (normally I just leave them in the smart playlist)
6. Build overview in Serato (and auto BPM at the same time)
7. Play in Rapid Evolution or Mixed in Key and add the key to the "grouping" field if required

p.s. always use house - tech, house - deep etc rather than tech-house, deep-house etc.

that way all the house stays together (i even use house - breaks and house - techno)

same applies for hip-hop, lounge etc.

what are smart playlists?

This is pretty much what i do as well.

sweet.

do you use itunes? select "new smart playlist" from the file menu and it should make sense

they auto update so that every time a tune fits the rules it goes in the smart playlist.

i always put the source of my tunes (i.e. xpressbeats, beatport, vinyl etc) so one of my playlists has the rules "comment" contains "xpressbeats" and so on.......

i've just started using on my new reinstall. will check it out. nice one.