Search for “Hip-Hop” in most Serato libraries and you will miss half the hip-hop. The rest is filed under “Hip Hop”, “HipHop”, “Rap”, “Hip-Hop/Rap”, blank, or a number in brackets.
Messy tags are the reason crates fall apart, Smart Crates fill with the wrong tracks and searching mid-set fails. They are also fixable, and the fix lasts, as long as you do it in the right order.
This is step 5 of organising your Serato library, in depth.
The four kinds of genre mess
Before fixing anything, it helps to know what you are looking at. Sort your library by the Genre column and you will find some mix of these:
- Blank. No genre at all. Usually tracks from record pools, rips, or downloads that came without tags.
- Junk. “Other”, “Unknown”, “Genre”, a website name, or a record pool’s own category. Technically filled in, practically useless.
- Five spellings of the same thing. “R&B”, “RnB”, “R & B”, “Rhythm & Blues”. To Serato these are four different genres.
- Numbers in brackets. “(14)”, “(17)”. These are old ID3v1 genre codes, from when MP3 tags stored genre as a number. (14) is R&B. Serato shows the raw code, so the track never matches a search or a Smart Crate rule.
Each one needs a slightly different fix, but they all start in the same place.
Step 1: Back up first
Fixing tags writes to your music files. A backup means a bad bulk edit is a five-minute undo instead of a re-tag. A full backup is free in MLT.
Step 2: Decide your genre list before you touch a track
This is the step everyone skips, and it is why the mess comes back.
Write down the genres you actually want, spelled exactly how you want them. Keep it short. Fifteen to twenty-five main genres covers most libraries, and a short list is what makes the Genre column scannable when you are under pressure.
Anything more specific goes in a sub-genre, in its own column. Grouping and Composer both show in Serato’s library and are rarely used for anything else, so either one makes a clean home. Pick one and stick with it. Afrobeats in Genre, Amapiano in Grouping. Hip-Hop in Genre, 90s or Drill in Grouping.
Step 3: The manual way
If your library is a few hundred tracks, you can do this by hand in Serato:
- Turn off Protect Library in Serato’s Library + Display settings, or Serato will not let you edit track info.
- Show the Genre and Year columns and sort by Genre. Blanks group together at the top, and spelling variants sit next to each other.
- Fix the spellings first. It is the biggest win for the least work. Every “Hip Hop” and “HipHop” becomes your one chosen spelling.
- Replace the junk and the numbers. “Other” and “(14)” are the same job as a blank: look the track up and give it a real genre from your list.
- Fill the blanks. For anything you are unsure of, Discogs is the most reliable place to check both genre and year.
- Use the original release year. Not the compilation, not the remaster. A 1998 record tagged 2014 lands in the wrong era crate.
That works. It is also slow: a minute or so per track once you include looking things up, which turns a few thousand blank genres into days.
Step 4: The faster way, with Tags & Cues
Tags & Cues does the same job across your whole library and shows you every change before it writes anything.
- One scan, three sources. For each track it checks MLT’s own suggestions first, then online sources (Discogs, Apple and Spotify), then identifies the track by its audio if the tags give it nothing to go on.
- One spelling per genre. “Hip Hop”, “HipHop” and “Hip-Hop” all become a single canonical spelling, and the old numeric codes are repaired to their real genre.
- It leaves good tags alone. If a track already has a genre that is on the list, it is not offered a replacement.
- Sub-genres where you want them. When you accept a sub-genre suggestion, you choose whether it goes into Composer or Grouping.
- Year, too. Year suggestions sit alongside genre, and you can apply either or both.
- Five formats. Tags write to MP3, M4A, FLAC, WAV and AIFF.
You can accept suggestions one track at a time, or apply them in bulk across the whole library. On Serato 4 the changes are synced into Serato’s library for you, so they are there the next time you open it.
It is free to try on up to 25 tracks, so you can run it on a messy crate and check the results before deciding anything.
Watch it in action
Keeping it clean
New music is where the mess comes back in. Two habits stop it:
- Tag on the way in. Run new downloads through Tags & Cues before they disappear into the library, while you still remember where they came from. Add New Music (free) files them into your main music folder at the same time.
- Stick to the list. If a new genre genuinely earns a place, add it to the list on purpose. If not, it is a sub-genre.
What clean tags unlock
Once your genres and years are right, everything built on them starts working:
- Crates you can build by genre and era without hunting. See the full organising order.
- Smart Crates that fill themselves correctly, because the rules finally match.
- Folders on disk that make sense: Switch can reorganise your files by genre and year and update Serato as it goes.
Download Music Library Tools for Mac or Windows. Tags & Cues is free on up to 25 tracks, and Backup, Missing Tracks, Versions and Add New Music are free to use.