If you're experiencing a problem with Serato DJ, where MP3s purchased on Beatport cannot seem to save key, BPM, or track analyses and overviews, then perhaps a tool that I have written might help!

Check out MP3TagRebuilder, a simple Python script I wrote to address this issue with my own DJ library!

This tool addresses an issue I've been encountering somewhat frequently over the last few years, where my Beatport music purchases have a weird glitch in Serato where overviews and tag data won't save, even after using the "Analyze" feature. The only solution I have found, even after writing Serato support, is to rebuild the MP3 files' ID3 tags destructively.

However, every program that I know of that does this ends up dropping important tags, such as Album Art, because none of them provide a direct pathway to simply destroying the ID3 tags and then rebuilding them with a new datastructure; most of them only seem to support converting from ID3v2 to ID3v1 and back again. So I wrote my own!

If you are encountering this issue and are feeling bold enough to test my code on your own library (MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP AND TEST IT!!!!), head on over to Github and check it out!

You will need a working Python environment and must be comfortable with a command prompt. Instructions for running this tool are included in README.md, and instructions for installing Python can be found here.

Get it from Github here: https://github.com/lyjia/mp3-tag-rebuilder

(TL;DR: Listen to my new mix here!)

For the past several years I have had a DJ act centered around trippy house music, and in 2022 I decided to take this and coalesce it around a single act (or brand) I have taken to calling "P.O.P. music". Essentially, it is a unique blend of modern progressive house, organic house, and psy house. ("Psy house" or "Progressive Psy" being another term I've coined, since I don't know what people are currently calling this stuff. If it truly hasn't been labelled yet I should probably make a post explaining more...)

Fast forward to today, and out of all the various genres that I like to spin, this one seems to be resonating the most with people. It seems to be a fairly unique act; I know DJs that spin progressive house, I know DJs that like to drop nice world-flavored organic house cuts, and I even know a few folks out in the desert dropping psytrance-influenced progressive house sets to great success. But I don't know anyone (yet) blending these things into a cohesive whole. And that is the goal of P.O.P. Music: combining the three to create an enticing, stimulating, and energetic (but not too energetic!) mix that is just as much at home on the dance floor as it is in a chill lounge, on a long road trip, as a study buddy, or as companion for exploring altered states of consciousness.

I'll be honest: I get bored of straight progressive house. I used to have a deep house-prog house "act", and it was fun and people liked it, but it was a bit of a snooze to mix. Psytrance-influenced house music helped spice it up a bit, but it was still a little boring for me. Around this time I was attending burner parties in the deserts and steppes of Southern California, and a new kind of house music was emerging that I fell absolutely in love with: organic house, where the rigid synthesis of progressive house and techno gave way to sampled, real-life performances with foreign-language vocalists and instruments like cellos, oboes, tampuras, and the like. With this new genre you could travel from the Himalayas to the deserts of the middle east, from the Amazon to the Urals, from Death Valley to the steppes of Africa, all in an hour's time. As a collector of foreign music, this was love at first sight! And it seemed to be the missing piece that reinvigorated my interest in and love for house music.

Throughout 2022 I crystalized this act into something cohesive and consistent, and played it out in a variety of settings around San Diego. And every single time, people were blown away. After my sets people would come up to me and use words like "amazing" and "beautiful", or would tell me about how they had sex to it, or how a particular crescendo had moved them to tears.

P.O.P. Music will never be as exciting as something like dubstep or tech house, but it is not designed to be. It is music for the mind: it is for the psychonauts, the nerds and intellectuals, and the travelers among us. It is for those who find beauty as invigorating as a sick bass, and for those who desire to hear the sounds of the human voice but care not for the words that come out. It is for explorers, for the aesthetically starved, and those tired of dancefloors dominated by the excessive energy of balls-to-the-wall EDM. It is P.O.P. Music!

You can stream and download P.O.P. Music! Vol. 1 on SoundCloud, and it is also available for streaming on Mixcloud.