A crate is Serato's word for a playlist. Making one is a right click, so this could be a very short page. The reason it is not is that the hard part was never making them, it is ending up with a set of them you can still navigate when the room is full and you have ten seconds.
Making one
- Right click in the crates panel down the left and choose the option to create a new crate.
- Name it. Short names read faster in a narrow panel, and you will be reading them under pressure.
- Drag tracks into it from your library. The tracks are not moved or copied, only referenced.
- To nest one inside another, drag a crate onto another crate and it becomes a subcrate.
The shortcut worth knowing is dragging a folder straight from Finder onto the crates panel. That makes a crate named after the folder with everything in it, which turns organizing you already did on your drive into structure inside Serato in one move.
A structure that survives a set
The most common mistake is organizing by how music is described rather than by how it gets used. Genre is a description. Mid set, you are not thinking in genres, you are thinking about what happens next.
Top level: how you decide
Energy, tempo, or the kind of room. Whatever your first thought is when you need the next track. This is the layer you will hit hardest.
Second level: subcrates
Inside each, split by genre or style if it helps. This is where description is useful, because you have already narrowed by use.
A crate for new music
Unplayed and unproven, kept out of the trusted sections until it has earned a place. The single highest value crate most people are missing.
A crate per gig
Built the day before, not the hour before. Doubles as a record of what you actually played and where.
Two levels is the sweet spot. Deep nesting feels organized while you are building it and costs you clicks exactly when you have none to spare.
Smart crates
A smart crate fills itself from rules, for example everything above a certain BPM, or everything added in the last month, or everything with a particular word in the genre field.
They are excellent for library maintenance. A rule that collects everything with no BPM, or everything added this month, gives you a permanent to-do list that keeps itself current.
They are weaker for performance, because a rule cannot capture the reason you would reach for a track. That reason is usually a feeling about the room, and there is no tag for it.
Housekeeping
- Rename crates to what they are now rather than what they were when you made them.
- Delete gig crates once they have stopped being useful, or archive them into one place.
- Keep the names short. A narrow panel truncates anything long and two crates that both read as Summer Deep... are worse than useless.
- Back up the library before a big reorganize.
If your drive is already organized
Plenty of DJs have already built this structure once, in folders, on the drive. Rebuilding it by hand inside Serato is the reason a lot of libraries stay half done.
DJBrooo takes those folders and mirrors them into Serato in one click, nested exactly as they are on your drive. Every format you would be playing is handled, mp3, wav, aiff, flac, aac, alac and ogg, plus video, and it finds your Serato library wherever it lives, external and USB drives included.
It adds only what is new, backs up your library before every run, and leaves your cues, gain and beatgrids alone.