A friend asked me to turn a 92-minute recorded set into a 60-minute version for a radio slot. The source was a single WAV, 48 kHz/24-bit, about 1.2 GB, with no cue sheet and no tracklist — just a file
A friend handed me a 2 TB drive last month: 4,300 tracks, mostly FLAC, a few hundred ALAC, all ripped or downloaded over about eight years. He'd noticed that a handful of his "lossless" files sounded
Last spring I was prepping a 74-minute ambient set for a small room with a borrowed CDJ setup. I had ripped the tracks myself from FLAC, converted to 320 kbps MP3 for the USB stick (the club's players
A friend handed me a 2 TB drive last spring: 312 WAV files from six years of field recording, names like `ZOOM0007.WAV`, plus a spreadsheet with dates and locations that had drifted out of sync with t
A friend handed me a DVD-R of a 2011 radio residency: 23 two-hour shows, 1,400 song boundaries, all as one 6 KB cue sheet. The cue was valid text but the timestamps were off by a constant 1.8 seconds
Last spring I finally ripped my entire CD collection to FLAC — 4,800 tracks, roughly 320 GB, spread across 210 albums. When I shuffled the whole library for the first time, the volume jumps were bruta
Last spring I played a four-hour closing set from a 2,300-track library split across two USB drives and a laptop running Traktor 3.8 on macOS 13.6. Somewhere around hour three, the laptop's USB bus hi
Last spring a friend handed me a 12-track mixtape she'd assembled in a DAW she barely knew, and asked why it sounded quiet on her phone but loud in her car. All 12 WAVs, 24-bit/48 kHz, rendered from t
A friend hands me a 2-hour community radio show: one continuous WAV, 48 kHz, 24-bit, recorded off the desk feed. She wants it as individual tracks for the archive, with the spoken intros attached to t
Rekordbox 6.6.4 on macOS 13.4, library of 912 tracks, all analyzed with the same settings. After a batch re-analysis, 37 tracks showed keys that were a semitone off from what Mixed In Key had reported
A friend handed me a 900-track folder last month: mostly 2000s electronic singles, tagged inconsistently, bitrates ranging from 128 to 320 kbps. He wanted a playlist for a long drive and complained se
Last month a friend handed me two drives: about 2,100 tracks ripped from his own CD collection between 2003 and 2011, plus a folder of 480 cue sheets. The audio was all there, but the tags were a mess
A friend handed me a 3,800-track playlist export from a streaming service. CSV, one row per track: title, artist, album, duration, and a "position" column. The position column was the problem. It ran
Last spring I inherited a 6,200-track library from a friend who had ripped it over fifteen years across three laptops. Most of it was FLAC, some 320 kbps MP3, and the metadata was a mess in one specif
Last spring I inherited a 5-hour, 44.1 kHz/16-bit stereo recording of a warehouse party — one WAV, 1.6 GB, no tracklist, and a promoter who wanted per-track files for a digital release. The DJ never s
A friend handed me a 6-hour recording of a festival set, exported from a DJ app that shall remain unnamed, plus a CSV of cue points. Version matters here: the app's export wrote times as `mm:ss:ff` wh
Last spring I recorded a three-hour warehouse set off a Soundcraft mixer's USB out: 48 kHz, 24-bit, one unbroken 2.1 GB WAV. The DJ played mostly vinyl with long blends, so there were maybe six obviou
A friend sent me a 2h14m live set as a single 320 kbps MP3, ripped from a radio broadcast. It sounded fine on speakers, but through headphones at every track boundary there was a tiny click, and the t
A friend handed me a 3-hour 24-bit/48kHz recording of a live DJ set — 2.9 GB, one continuous file, transitions that ride for 60–90 seconds each. He wanted it split for streaming and "made the quiet pa
Two summers ago I burned a 40-hour playlist onto a USB stick for a long drive. The stick was formatted exFAT, the head unit was a 2016-era Pioneer that claimed FLAC support, and about 600 of the 2,400
