[hmstx]

Pioneer DJ, I mean AlphaTheta, probably don't even know MusicBrainz exists. They're too busy selling subscriptions for RekordBox. And they do nothing to help you with the metadata on your files, besides filtering in browser mode.

I can relate to the problem of revising genre or energy ratings over time. I've gone with custom genre tags for ages, ie "dub/house/techno" or "funk/disco/edits" with a sprinkling of extra qualifiers in the comment field and do bulk updates from MP3Tag/Foobar2k. The extras only really help when preparing "crates" for export to USB for outside use, or when just playing off the entire collection at home. I'm fast, but still not much time to read the comment fields when browsing on the players, much less input any words with the scroll wheel.

I keep every purchase around in FLAC, and the part I might realistically play out stays in AIFF, for minimum fiddling of tags (ie stars map a bit differently between Traktor and Rekordbox) - because of course Rekordbox will warn you you're exporting files you can't play anywhere, but won't do anything to transcode them.

Lossless whenever possible because I just want to give the sound quality as much of a chance as I can when recording sets, especially if they might get posted online and getting lossy-transcoded multiple times. I've tried the mp3 of mp3 thing, and you do hear it at home (out at a gig, most of the time, probably not).

I don't suffer from track bulimia, so the numbers work out - and disk space has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 20 years.

[alisonatwork]

I let this thread go for a while, but just saw your reply and wanted to say thanks for your insight! I am a hobbyist DJ for whom "playing out" just means "on a friend's equipment from time to time" so I probably don't need to fuss as much as I do, but your experience has kinda reaffirmed for me that keeping stuff MP3 is going to be the least hassle.

It really used to annoy me that bringing along just a USB left me with a useless "filenames only" view on old CDJs, and then even when they did read the file they only cached the metadata of a fraction of the tags, which is how I ended up same as you - custom genres with modifiers in the comment. It's not the ideal data structure for organizing your collection at home, but it seems to work the best for bringing music to go.