Why I Keep a Plain-Text Setlist Next to My Decks

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 hiccuped and the second drive disappeared for about eight seconds. Traktor kept playing the loaded track, but the browser went blank for that drive, and every folder I had planned to pull from was gone until I reseated the cable. I finished the set, but I spent the next week rebuilding the way I prepare so that a blank browser doesn’t turn into a blank mind.

What I changed was small. I now keep a plain-text file per set, one line per intended track, with three fields: artist, title, and the folder path I expect it to live under. I generate it from the collection export before I leave the house, then I keep it open in a terminal on a second screen. The script is short and boring:

# dump a setlist with paths from a Traktor collection.nml
python3 - <<'PY'
import re, xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('collection.nml')
for e in tree.iter('ENTRY'):
    loc = e.find('LOCATION')
    if loc is None: continue
    path = loc.get('DIR','').replace('/:','/') + loc.get('FILE','')
    if any(k.lower() in path.lower() for k in ['/sets/2024-05/', '/peak/']):
        print(f"{e.get('ARTIST','?')}\t{e.get('TITLE','?')}\t{path}")
PY

That’s it. No app, no database. When the browser blanks out, I can grep the file for the next track and know which drive and folder to look in. It also doubles as a paper trail: after the set I can see what I actually played versus what I planned, which is more honest than my memory of a four-hour night.

The trade-off is upkeep. The file is only useful if I regenerate it after adding tracks, and I have forgotten that twice. The first time I did, the setlist pointed at a folder I had renamed, and I spent 20 seconds in front of a crowd scrolling instead of mixing. The second time I caught it in soundcheck because the file had a stale timestamp. So the rule I follow now is: no setlist is final until it’s been regenerated on the same machine that’s playing. That’s a cost, but it’s a smaller cost than the alternative.

Where this fails is obvious but worth saying. If the whole laptop goes, the text file goes with it, so I keep a copy on my phone’s notes app, plain text, no images. And if I’m playing from a thumb drive into a club CDJ, the paths mean nothing, so the setlist becomes a memory aid rather than a lookup table. I’ve also stopped trusting it for key or BPM, because those change with the edit and the file doesn’t know. It’s a map of where things are, not a map of what they sound like.

If you’ve built something similar, what do you keep in it, and what have you deliberately left out because the upkeep wasn’t worth it?