How to order a DJ set from a plain text list (no Rekordbox needed)

A list of "Artist - Title" lines, one per track, in the order you plan to play them, is enough to analyse the shape of a set. What you get from names alone is genre detection, an energy estimate and the curve; what you cannot get is real harmonic mixingChaining tracks whose keys get along, so the overlap does not clash., because the keyThe note and mode a track is written in — what decides whether two tracks sit well together. is not in the filename.

Almost everything written about set preparation assumes your library is loaded into Rekordbox, Serato or Traktor and that you will export from there. That is a reasonable assumption for a DJ with years of tidy library, and a fairly bad one for everybody else.

There are a lot of people building sets in a notes app, in a chat with a friend, or on their phone. That is also a list of tracks in an order, which is all it takes to start.

What can be done with names alone

With "Artist - Title" per line you can already:

• Detect the genre of most tracks and anchor the analysis to the BPMBeats per minute: a track's tempo, and the first number any DJ looks at. band that belongs to it. A psy-trance track dropped into a techno set is judged against its own yardstick, not the set's.
• Estimate energy by position when there is no other data. It is the weakest estimate of the lot and you should know that, but it gives you a baseline.
• See the shape of the set and compare it against the one you wanted: warm-upThe opening set: its job is to prepare the floor, not to show off., peak timeThe highest stretch of the night, with a full floor and the energy up., after.

What you cannot do without data is real harmonic mixing. The key is not in the filename, and no amount of parsing invents it.

The three routes, and what each gives you

None of this is all or nothing. You can start by pasting the list, see whether the analysis tells you anything useful, and only then decide whether exporting from your software is worth it.

How to paste it

One line per track, in the order you plan to play them:

Sopik - Call Me Daddy
T78, Van Giessen - Emergency
Sara Landry, LEGZDINA - Pressure

It also accepts "Title - Artist" if you have it the other way round, and it strips leading numbers if you pasted from a numbered list.

What if my list has timestamps or set positions in it?

Paste it anyway. Leading numbers and index markers are stripped, so a list copied out of a tracklist site or a recording description usually comes through intact. What confuses it is extra text on the same line — a label, a catalogue number, a "[free download]" — so if a line looks wrong, that is the first thing to remove.

Does the order I paste actually matter?

It is the whole input. The analysis is a judgement about an ordering, so pasting the tracks alphabetically and expecting a verdict on your set will give you a verdict on a set nobody is going to play. If you do not yet have an order, paste your best guess — a guess is a set, an alphabetical list is not.

Can I go the other way and get the set into my software?

Yes, with one caveat worth knowing before you try. See below.

Will it recognise an obscure track?

Genre detection works from artist and title against what is known about them, so a white label with no artist credited, a bootleg edit with a made-up name, or your own unreleased track will not be recognised — and when nothing is recognised the analysis falls back to estimating by position, which is the weakest input there is. A set made mostly of unreleased material is the case where exporting from your software, with whatever BPM it already measured, is worth the extra step.

And for exporting

If you built the set from a text list and then want it in your software, the format to use is M3U8: save it next to the music and it relinks by filename. The native Rekordbox and Traktor formats will show the tracks as "missing", because from a text list we do not have the real paths to your files.

That is not a bug that can be fixed at this end — a path is a fact about your machine, and a list of names does not contain it. The import formats page sets out which format survives which round trip. And if the list you have is a Serato crate rather than text, Serato crates and Rekordbox explains why there is no text export and what to do instead.

If your tags turn out to be empty once you do export, tracks with no BPM or key covers what can be recovered from the audio and how much to trust it. And if you want the checks the analysis is running, is my set in the right order lists them.

Paste your list