Editing Songs

Once you've added your songs, you might need to modify or correct song information. There are many features to help you do this, and most are available under the right/option click menu from the search table. It is important to verify and correct all your song data. Not only will it help improve your own mixing, but it will improve the quality of information shared with other DJs.

There are a couple of ways to edit the details of a particular song:

• From a list or table, right/option click a song and choose “edit”
• From the “edit” button next to the current song field
• Drag and drop a song or filename from the OS or external application

When you edit a song, you will see the familiar dialog:

Editing songs individually is useful for correcting fields, determining bpm/key/time signature information and setting styles. It is also useful to associate a song to its file, which is important to be able to drag and drop songs with digital mixing software. Although you can detect bpms and keys from within the edit song dialog, it is slow and recommended to be done in batch (see below). For accuracy, it is recommended to use the bpm tappers and the built-in piano/keyboard to manually determine or verify bpm and key information. You can also read/write song tags from the edit song dialog, but again this is sometimes easiest in batch (see below).

If you want to set the fields of multiple songs at the same time, then select the songs in the search table then right/option click and choose from the “set field(s)” submenu. You can use this feature to clear or set individual fields and set the flags of the selected songs. If you choose “filename” you can browse to choose a new set of files for the selected songs (the number of files you choose must match the number of selected songs, and are assigned alphabetically).

The best way to automatically detect keys and bpms is in batch (i.e. multiple songs at a time) when you're away from your computer, since it usually takes a while and consumes system resources. To do this, select multiple songs from the search table then right/option click and choose “detect→key” or “detect→bpm”. You will have an option to overwrite any existing values.

To alleviate the amount of cpu resources detection requires, you can sometimes lower the priority of the application at the operating system level. To do this in Windows, for example, you would right click the Rapid Evolution process in the task manager (usually “javaw.exe”) and select Set Priority→Below Normal. Your mileage may vary…

Please note that while automatic key and bpm detection is provided, neither is 100% accurate and it is recommended that you verify this information with your own ear. However, automatic detection is a useful approximation until you have the time to do it yourself.

If you manage your song tag information with other software, you can also update your song information by reading tags in bulk. Simply select the songs in the search table and choose “tags→read” under the right/option click menu. You will be given the option to overwrite any existing values. Similarly, you can write tag information from Rapid Evolution with “tags→write”. You can configure in the options menu what information to write, as well as whether to include the remix information in the title field (for popular media players that don't support a remix field). If writing tags, please test and make sure it causes no problems with your audio files and applications first!

Although you can set a song's styles individually within the edit song dialog, and within the style menus (see Managing Styles), you can also right/option click a group of selected songs and choose “set styles(s)” or “add to style(s)”. In most cases you'll want to use “add to style(s)” because “set style(s)” is absolute and will overwrite all style information for the selected songs (as in, it can remove songs from styles they were previously in).

There are various helpful functions for maintaining your song data located under the “database” menu. These were created on an “as needed” basis to deal with various song management tasks. If you need a function that's not provided, please share your idea in the forum!

• assign track numbers: Use to assign incremental track numbers to the selected songs.
• change drive letters: Allows you to change the drive letters of the selected songs (useful for external hard drives).
• convert fields to lower case: Converts the artist/album/track/title/remix fields to lower case.
• convert fields to proper case: Converts the artist/album/track/title/remix fields to proper case.
• convert fields to upper case: Converts the artist/album/track/title/remix fields to upper case.
• correct key format: Converts the key fields of the selected songs to your currently configured key format (sharp/flat/key code/custom) in the options menu.
• detect broken file links: This allows you to detect songs in Rapid Evolution whose filename cannot be found. The songs with broken links will be displayed in a window, and you have the ability to edit and correct the songs directly or remove them from your collection.
• format bpm values: Allows you to round the selected song's bpm values to a specified number of decimal places.
• format track numbers: Adds a '0' before tracks 1-9 so the selected songs sort properly.
• parse remix from song fields: Often times remix information is entered in the title field. This will attempt to extract any remix information out of the title fields by looking for phrases inside parenthesis or brackets.
• remove file extensions from song title fields: This will remove any file extensions at the end of the selected song title fields.
• rename files: This allows you to change the filename for multiple songs at a time, based on a pattern string.
• retrieve album covers: This will attempt to retrieve the album covers for the selected songs from discogs.com.
• retrieve into from discogs.com: This will attempt to retrieve additional song information for the selected songs from discogs.com, including the record label, release date and styles/genres.
• update file locations: Use this if the locations of your song files have changed (not just the drive letters) and you want to associate the selected songs with their files. Currently this will only work if the files have not been renamed.