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Where to find the music folders

Lesson Beginner Stage 1: Your First Setup November 2023

On YouTube this video is called Complete Beginner DJ Lessons Where to Find the Music Folders

What this lesson teaches

The shortest lesson in this block, and it answers a question that stops people on day one: the software opened, and there is no music in it.

Where the music is

Down the left of the screen is a list of locations - the same drives, folders and shortcuts your computer already has. His music is on the desktop, so he clicks there.

Click a folder and its contents appear in the main panel in the middle. Click a different folder and the first lot disappear, replaced by the new ones.

That is the whole mechanism.

The model worth holding

The reason to spend a moment on something this simple is that it sets up how you think about the software for everything afterwards.

The program is not storing your music. It is looking at folders that already exist on your machine. Move a folder in Windows or on the Mac and the software will lose track of it; rename a file and the program will not find it.

That is also why the next step - a library, with analysis and tags written into it - exists at all. Browsing folders is fine for finding something now. A library is what lets the software remember what it learned about a track the last time it saw it.

For today, though: find the folder, click it, and the tracks are there.

Contents of the video

Video number two for the complete and utter beginner in this selection of videos, we're looking at the software. And again, just to clarify, if you haven't seen video number one, I'm using the screen right in front of me so you can see it live as there we go, there I am. And I'm just using VirtualDJ. But basically, any program you're using will pretty much follow exactly what I'm going to explain. On the left hand side of your screen, you will see icons relating to your laptop, to your computer. And basically, all you need to do is find where your music is. So I've got my music on the desktop at the moment. So I'm going to click there. Now I've got icons here, I can highlight one of those icons, click down. And now we should get all of the tracks or the files in the main area here. So very simple, very quick video

Explaining how to find the tracks on the laptop you're using, and how to load them. Now if I want to select a new set of tracks, all I have to do is highlight to another folder, click down, and the one that was there is now gone. And the new folder is there video number two. Thank you for watching. Practice and enjoy

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.

This video is part of

The stages are the way through

Below this line is the back catalogue, newest first. Useful for browsing, but it is not a course - the videos are in the order they were filmed, not the order to learn them in. Work the stages instead: each one assumes the one before it.

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