Managing Styles

Styles (e.g. genres) play an important role in profiling your music. The more time you put into refining your styles, the easier it will be to find compatible songs to mix together. Well defined styles improve the accuracy of the “style similarity” statistic which is used in the generation of playlists and mix sets. A song can belong to more than one style.

Not just being restricted to Genre, styles can be used for a number of attributes to improve search results for mixes. For instance you may want to play tunes from a certain era, so you would create a set of styles for different eras, or you may want to play a warm-up set, so you would create styles for energy. Have a look at the Styles page to get some ideas of what other people are doing.

The buttons shown here under the styles window may be hidden. There is a little arrow under the window (not shown here) that toggles the show/hide state of the buttons.

Click “add” in the styles section on the right side of the main screen to create a new style. After giving it a name you will be brought to the edit style dialog.

To delete styles, simply highlight them and hit the delete button. You can highlight multiple styles and delete all at once. Be aware that some styles my be highlighted within 'trees', so make sure only the styles you want to delete are highlighted. To be sure you can click the 'clear' button then highlight the styles to be deleted.

To edit a style you can either right/option click it or select it and click “edit” in the styles section. The style can be renamed so long as its name is unique. Songs can be added individually or by keyword. Adding songs individually can be more tedious, but doesn't have the unexpected side-effects keywords can sometimes have. Click “add song(s)” and a search prompt will appear for you to select the songs you want to add. If you choose “add keyword(s)” you can enter words or phrases, usually artist or album names. If you entered the keyword “jungle”, for example, any song that contained the word “jungle” in it (in the artist/album/track/title/remix/comments/custom fields) would become a member of that style.

Keyword functionality has been kept due to its flexibility. It allows styles to be created quickly and easily. However, sometimes keywords can have unexpected consequences. For example, if you enter the keyword “Air” referring to the artist, you might find more than just “Air” songs would be added to that style (because “Air” is a substring of many other words). For this reason, it is recommended to avoid using small keywords. There's also an “exclude” list similar to the “include” list for a style, which allows you to exclude specific songs or keywords (overriding the include list). For practical purposes, however, it's not necessary to manage this list so it's kept out of sight. You can manage it by clicking “show exclude list” in the bottom left of the edit style dialog, but you should only have to do this if you decide to use keywords.

You can drag and drop styles onto each other to make 1 style the child of another. This will create a tree like structure for the styles, which is useful for organizing large amounts of styles. The rules for doing this are quite flexible. A style can be the child and parent of multiple styles, so long as it is not the child or parent of itself (Rapid Evolution should prevent you from breaking these rules). One thing you should be aware of is that when displaying the styles, the program will attempt to remove the parent names out of a given style for each location in the tree. For example, the style “breaks, funky” will show up as “funky” under “breaks”, and “breaks” under “funky”. This currently depends on the naming convention and requires the parts of the style to be comma seperated.

NB: If you want to delete a parent style you will have to either move or delete all of it's 'children'.

To set a song's styles individually you must edit the song and highlight the appropriate styles for that song in the edit song dialog, then click “ok”. This is the ideal method if we all had enough time.

You can select a group of songs and drag them onto a style to add them to that style. For Windows users it helps to use the right mouse button when dragging a group of songs. This is an easy way to add a set of songs to a style, but if you wish to set multiple styles on a set of songs at the same time, then you should use the next method.

You can also right/option click a group of selected songs in the search table and choose one of 3 options under the styles menu:

• add to
• remove from
• set

In most cases you'll want to use “add to” because “set” 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 2 ways to list the songs of a style. First, in the upper right corner of the edit style dialog, you can click “list songs”. This will display a dialog with all songs in that style. Here you can choose to remove songs that don't belong.

Alternately, if “find all: only within selected styles” in the options menu is selected you can simply highlight the style(s) in the main screen and click “find all”. Only the songs which belong to one of the selected styles will be displayed.

If you have a lot of styles, you can increase the style display size and make the styles section on the main screen span the entire vertical length by enabling “full styles layout” in the options menu, under the display tab.