Custom Crate Columns – Serato DJ Tips

A rather unknown trick of Serato’s library management is custom crate columns. This handy tool allows you to set an organisation rule for each of your individual crates. Serato will then remember how you want each crate organised, allowing you to dynamically manage your library and set rules that best suit the crates needs.

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How to enable custom crate columns

Before we can set the rules within our crates, we first need to turn on custom columns in the settings. This can be found under the Library + Display plane in preferences.

Preferences > Library + Display > Custom Crate Columns

Organising crates

To organise a crate simply click on a column header. You can click it again to change if it is ascending or descending. Crates based around history you can organise by the order the tracks were played in by sorting via the # column. This number sorting is also how you would order a crate via album track numbers.

You can sort by the following track meta data, to add or remove columns simply right click on any column to bring up a menu where you can select and deselect them.

Added
Album
Artist
Bit rate
BPM
Comment
Composer
Filename
Genre
Grouping
Key
Label
Length
Location
Remixer
Sampling Rate
Size
Track
Year

Serato also allows DJ’s to secondary sort, so for example you can have a crate organised by BPM and then by Key if you wish. To do this hold CMD (Mac) or CNTRL (Windows) and click on a secondary column. You can delete this secondary sorting by holding SHIFT + CMD (Mac) or SHIFT + CNTRL (windows) and clicking on the secondary column header again.

Serato Library Organised By Key — A Serato library organised by BPM and key.

Why is this useful?

There are various scenarios where a crate would suit a certain sorting. By enabling custom crate sorting we are given the freedom to organise crates to the best of our abilities rather than using one over riding rule for the whole library.

For example a crate built from the history would be best organised by order played, to keep the order of the set in place. Alternatively a crate based around one genre of music might be best organised by Key and a crate full of A Capella’s sorted by by track title.