I’ve been playing at Fabric for 10 years now and not only is it an honor to have a residency there, it is bar none one of my favorite places to play in the whole world. While I am often playing with Diz, this time I am solo this time in Room 3 with Terry Francis. Me and Terry always have a party in room 3, playing crazier and crazier tracks in the wee hours in the morning and generally just having a blast. I’m sure this Saturday will be no different.

This gig is also the kickoff to my Vizual Summer tour – I’ll be based out of London from 15 May to 14 July and playing around Europe.

There’s a lot of good music out there and I’ve picked up some good bits to drop. I’m also looking to test out some of my new jammies on the Fabric system!

For more info: http://www.fabriclondon.com/

One of the things I use most in iTunes is Playlists. I use them to organize groups of music to burn the cds I use to dj (I am not a laptop dj). Using Playlists serves several purposes: when I get a lot of new music, I go through and rate the tracks and then group the best tracks in a ‘master’ group by giving it a playlist. Ratings is another feature in iTunes that I just started using in earnest in the past couple years. I only rate the tracks I will play out and those either get 4 or 5 stars – tracks below that threshold are not worthy for me to play (that is part of my job as a dj). From the master playlist, I then make smaller groups by playlist that will each fit on a cd. I always burn two copies of each cd to put in my wallet so that I can either play two copies of a track, or another track on that cd even if one is playing in the other CDJ.

As any dj will tell you, cds get scratched, left in the cd players or given away. Thus, my playlists are vital documents that keep my cd wallet organized and up to date. After a dj trip, I can look through my wallet and see which cds are missing and go back to my playlists and burn them. I use Toast to burn my cds, mainly because it supports CD TEXT which grabs the artist and title information and displays it on the cd players we use (as well as many car and home stereos). Recent versions of Toast grab all your playlists from iTunes making it much easier to organize your tracks in iTunes and then burn with Toast.

When I got back from Miami about ten days ago, I could tell something was amiss with the external drive that stores my entire iTunes library. Even if nothing was wrong, the drive would run out of space in a matter of weeks and it is always good practice to leave approximately 1/3 empty space on any drive for maximum performance. Now, I was getting the dreaded Mac beach ball every time I wanted to play a track. It would eventually play, but I just knew this drive’s days were numbered. It was important that I got everything off this drive and moved it to a new drive before it completely died. First, I did the usual checks in Disk Utility and the drive started to unmount itself before Disk Utility could finish any repairs. This is never a good sign. When the drive would stay mounted long enough to complete a repair, Disk Utility would say the drive was OK, but I knew this just wasn’t the case.

I went out and bought a new larger drive and tried to go the normal route of changing the location of my iTunes library folder to the new drive, then checking the ‘Consolidate my iTunes music’ box in iTunes > Preferences > Library > Organize Library… This should copy all of the music on the current drive (the one that was failing) to the new drive, all the while keeping the folder structure, playlists and ratings. So, I hit ‘OK’ and went about my business as I knew copying over 485GB of music would take up most of the day. It would copy for a couple hours, then just stop with a warning that my ‘Device has been improperly removed’. Basically, the drive was unmounting itself. Not good.

Using an old trick I learned from some audio email groups I belonged to, I put the failing drive in the freezer for a while which sometimes can help a troubled drive (especially if it tends to overheat). I took it out, and started the copying process all over again. The drive would be really responsive right out of the icebox, but as soon as the drive would heat up, the same thing would happen. I quickly realized that I would never be able to copy all the files this way. Then, I remembered that I had backed up my iTunes library not too long ago (it happened to be October). So, I dragged my current iTunes Library file, as well as my iTunes Music Library.xml file which should be stored in Users/~me/Music/iTunes/ to the desktop. Then, I opened up iTunes and it was like it had never been opened – completely blank but with fresh library files. Next, I went to Add to Library… and added all the music I backed up in October. This took 9 hours. With this, I could see exactly where the old library had left off, and what I needed to copy from the old drive. I could see exactly which track was the last track I had copied when I organized my iTunes library by ‘Date Modified’ (check this box in View Options).

Luckily, using the freezer trick, the old drive would mount and work for a short period. I dragged the newer iTunes library files to a safe place and copied back my old ones. Then, I launched iTunes again and grabbed all the tracks I had added since the October backup – 1210 tracks/54GB. I tried to copy these to a third drive so I could then add them to my new library on my new drive. But, I was running into the same problem as before as the drive would unmount as soon as it was getting hot. Using the freezer, I could copy about 75-100 tracks at a time so this is what I did. All in all, to copy 1200 tracks took about 3 days as after each group I would have to unmount the drive and put it back in the freezer for about 30 minutes. Finally, I had copied all of the tracks.

From here, I dragged my old iTunes library files back to the desktop, copied over the newer files and added all of the 1210 tracks to my new library. With my old drive unmounted, I could now name my new drive the same name as the old drive. This is important, because now I could use the older iTunes Library file to keep all of my playlists and ratings! Since my new drive was the same name and folder structure as the old drive, all of the playlists would point to the right place!

The obvious lesson from this is to have your library backed up often. Yet, with huge libraries, this is not always easy (or possible). Still, there are a few features that Apple could implement in iTunes that could save a lot of time if the same thing happens to someone else (or me again for that matter): 1) add the ability to archive all or selected playlists. Now, you can only export/import one at a time. Thus, if your drive dies, but you have the music backed up, you can have the playlists stored somewhere else and recover them. 2) With this, there should be a preference to update the playlist files to tell where the tracks are stored. 3) add the ability to archive your entire iTunes library (similar to the ‘Archive Mailbox’ feature in Mail). Using compression, I’m sure one’s whole iTunes library, playlists, ratings, iPhone apps, etc. could be shrunk down considerably. I would totally back this up once a week if I could get it down to say 50% of the size.

Still, with iTunes (and peoples digital music collections approaching a decade), perhaps it is time for a ‘Pro’ music app á la Aperture that is built to handle large libraries, have easier support for multiple drives and even have basic editing features. Until then, I’ll just be happy I saved 6 years of playlists.

There are an overwhelming amount of parties but here’s a little rundown of where I’ll be dropping some tunes:

Wednesday, March 24

Amenti & Solid Tokyo Party
Iz & Diz, Fred Everything, Ken ECB, Olivier Desmet and more
Beach Plaza Hotel
1401 Collins Ave, South Beach
12n-11pm
Set time: 7:30-8:45pm [with Diz]
Click here for VIP ticket info

The Goods presented by Nordic Trax & Alphabet Music
Joshua Iz, DJ Heather, Ken ECB, Halo, Luke McKeehan and more
Love/Hate
423 Washington Ave, South Beach
10pm-5am
Set time: 1am-2am
Click here for event info

Thursday, March 25

apt 5 years in your ears
Mark Farina, DJ Heather, Joshua Iz, Ken ECB, Fred Everything, Gene Farris, Colette, Olivier Desmet and more
Chesterfield Hotel
855 Collins Ave, South Beach
12n-5am | $15
Set time: 3-4pm
Click here for presale ticket info – Hurry, only a few tickets left!

Friday, March 26

Free Form
Iz & Diz, DJ Heather, Fred Everything, Olivier Desmet, Joshua Heath, Kai Ishikawa
Love/Hate
423 Washington Ave, South Beach
10pm-5am | Free
Set time: 3:30am-Close [with Diz]
Click here for more info

Saturday, March 26

It’s Just House To Us
Presented by Tight Recordings, Alphabet Music, Vizual Records and DanceCultureCares.org
Paul Johnson, Colette, Chuck Love, Joshua Iz, Ken ECB, Atnarko, Thomas Sahs, Latenight Society, Andrew Emil and many more…
Clinton Hotel and Spa
825 Washington Ave, South Beach
12pm-3am | Free
Set time: 9:30-11pm
Click here for more info

The show airs from 2am-6am GMT every Sunday morning (9pm Saturday night Central Time) and Joshua Iz’s slot is 3am-5am GMT every first Sunday of the month. The show is hosted by Galaxy FM morning show personality JoJo and her husband Jacob Kelly (Baker Street Recordings).

Reaching a broadcast audience of well over 250,000 listeners throughout the UK, the show is an eclectic mix of soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, house, rock, alternative and everything in between.

Listen to the show online on Galaxy FM every Sunday morning here: http://listen.galaxyyorkshire.co.uk/

Shows will be posted on Joshua Iz’s SoundCloud page two weeks after original air date.

Vizual Records presents its second release: Flower Sparks by Joshua Iz!

Get the release today from the Vizual Store or these fine outlets:

• Beatport
• Stompy
• Traxsource
• Juno
• What People Play

VIZ002 – Joshua Iz – Flower Sparks by vizual

Reviews for Flower Sparks:

These trax got bounce to it! something missing in a alot of trax nowadays. — Mike ‘Agent X’ Clark

Great EP all round but Flower Sparks sounds like it will cause a bit of madness. — Jimpster

Unmistakeable Izism! All cuts playable – full support. — Chris Duckenfield

Rydim Culture Is Rocking! — Chris Udoh

Quality stuff from Joshua as usual. Tone D is my fave of the ep. — DJ Heather

Alpha& Omega is the one for me, heavy deep house vibe. — DJ Sneak

Alpha & Omega is the shit! Loving Tone D too. Both are going to sound lovely on the late night sound systems and in the mix for more enlightened minds. Serious biz. — Mazi (Audio Soul Project)

© & (P) Vizual Records 2009. All rights reserved.

VIZ003 – Joshua Iz – Vizual Rydims #2 by vizual

After working with a slew of well respected labels including Classic, Prescription and Junior Boys Own, Joshua finally decided to start his own imprint. Drawing from a myriad of influences, from heavy Jamaican dub to bleepy Detroit techno, Vizual seeks to develop new musical forms that bridge the gap between pure organic music and abstract electronic sound paintings, yet creating something danceable in the process.

This first release features four new original tracks by Joshua. They are stripped down, rydims, ready to play and meant to be mixed!

Joshua’s dubby basslines and melodic keys, and reggae-tinged beats are there as usual and these tracks will fit in well in any dj set.

Get the release here:
https://www.beatport.com/en-US/html/content/release/detail/180345/vizual_rydims_1

Available exclusively from Beatport until 09 August 2009 [09/09/09], after that on all major download sites.

Samples can be found below or on the Vizual site.

01 BRAINHOUSE

02 JACKDUB

03 BLAZTHOLE

04 DUBBERBUB

This is dope house music, listen and learn everybody. — DJ Sneak

Jackdub is the cut for me! its the kinda groove im looking for in a house cut..its got that perfect blend of wierd underground and dancefloor without feeling contrived. — Jay Tripwire

I’m absolutely loving “Brainhouse” … great groove, will work wonderfully in my sets. — Q-Burns Abstract Message

My fav is Blazthole as it bangs the dancefloor away into oblivion… — Miles Maeda

Yes I Blazthole! — Luke Solomon

2. Basic Soul Unit The Stand Philpot

3. Atnarko & Jevne Get On Down (Roberto Rodriguez Mix) Onethirty

4. Blakkat Come On Shaboom

5. Key Boy Viva Blue (Ralph Myerz 5am Eternal Mix) Paper

6. Wireman Armour (Move D Mix) Prime Numbers

7. Replika Even Further (Pezzner Mix) Chillin’ Music

8. Monty Luke Panik Attack Mothership

9. Hermann & Kaden Karacho Freude am Tanzen

10. House Proud People Lonely Disco Dancer Cross Section

Check out samples here:

01) BRAINHOUSE

02) JACKDUB

03) BLAZTHOLE

04) DUBBERBUB