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How to · Serato DJ

Organize by genre in Serato DJ.

In Serato DJ Pro, organizing by genre is a tagging job before it is a crate job: fill the Genre field on every track, then build one crate per genre and let smart crates read the field for you. The rule that does the work is Genre contains, so a file tagged Deep House lands in your House crate the moment you import it. Here is how to organize Serato by genre without dragging thousands of tracks by hand.

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A Vibes library with colored vibe tags on every track, grouped by feel rather than by folder

Get the tag right once and every crate downstream fills itself.

Tagging tracks by genre in Serato DJ, step by step.

Serato reads the Genre field straight out of each file's tags, so nothing sorts by genre until that field is right. These steps cover Serato DJ Pro 4.0; crates, subcrates and smart crates work the same way in Serato DJ Lite 4.0.

01

Show the Genre column

Click the triangle at the top right of the library, just under the search box, or right-click any library column header. Both open the same column list. Tick Genre, and tick Grouping and Comment while you are there, since those two hold the sub-genre notes most DJs end up writing. Drag a column edge to resize it.

02

Fix the Genre tag in bulk

Double-click the Genre field in the library to edit it. Select several tracks first and the edit is applied to every track in the selection, so a hundred mislabeled files take one entry instead of a hundred. Filename, length, size, bit rate and sampling rate cannot be edited, because they belong to the file itself. On Serato DJ Pro 3.3.5 and below, uncheck Protect Library in Setup first.

03

Sort by genre, then by tempo

Click the Genre column header once to sort ascending and again for descending. Hold Cmd on macOS or Ctrl on Windows and click a second header, BPM for example, to assign it as a secondary sort, so each genre block is ordered by tempo inside itself. Cmd or Ctrl plus Shift on that second header switches secondary sorting off again.

04

Build one crate per genre

Click Add Crate in the crate panel and double-click the new crate to name it. Drag a second crate a little to the right, onto the name of the first, and it becomes a subcrate: House at the top with Deep House and Tech House nested under it. Drag it to the far left of the crate panel instead and it stays at the top level.

05

Let a smart crate fill each genre crate

Click Add Smart Crate, then Add Rule. Choose Genre from the field menu, choose Contains, and type the genre. Contains beats Is here, because Deep House and Tech House both match a House rule while Is would skip them. Tick Match all of the following Rules to stack a second rule such as BPM. Smart crates can be nested as subcrates like any other crate.

06

Add a second signal, and leave the files alone

In Serato DJ 4.0 the third library column is a track color label. Click it and pick a color so warm-ups and peak-time cuts separate at a glance inside one genre crate. Right-click a crate and choose Add To Favorites to pin it to the top of the list. Never move or rename music in Finder or Explorer: Serato stores a path, and moved files show up yellow and missing.

The catch

A genre tag is only as good as whoever typed it, and a store label like Dance or Electronic tells you nothing about whether a track opens a night or closes it. Smart crates can only match text that is already in the field, so a library with blank, inconsistent or plain wrong genres has to be re-tagged before any of this pays off.

AfterhoursMysteriousIntrospectiveEvolving

The faster way

Do the tagging once, export it back as crates.

Vibes imports your Serato library and reads your existing Genre, Mood and Grouping fields in as tags on the way through. Auto-Tagging then listens to each track and suggests a vibe for everything that arrived blank or wrong, and Vibe Sort walks the rest of the library past you with hotkeys, so confirming replaces typing. When the tagging is done, export the result straight back into Serato as crates.

See how it works
Smart Import detects your Serato library and brings crates and tags across in one pass
Auto-Tagging suggests a vibe from how a track actually sounds, not from a shop's genre label
Vibe Sort confirms a whole library with hotkeys, and Combinations turn tag overlaps into ready-made groups
Export writes it all back into Serato as crates, so you perform in the app you already know

Organize in Vibes, export to Serato DJ.

Your playlists, tags, ratings, and cue points travel back to the gear you play on, so nothing you do in Vibes is locked away.

Track 001 by Artist A

Track 001

Artist A

128
3A
Track 002 by Artist B

Track 002

Artist B

124
5B
Track 003 by Artist C

Track 003

Artist C

132
8A
Vibes App
Playlists
Vibes
Mood
Aggressive
Euphoric
Melancholic
Mysterious
Peaceful
Playful
Tense
Function
Arrangement
Sets
Club Night 12/28
NYE Closing Set
Rooftop 01/04

Frequently asked questions

The honest answers, including the trade-offs.

Pick one axis for your top level and stay with it. For most open-format DJs that axis is genre: one crate per genre, subcrates for sub-genres, and smart crates doing the filling. Everything else, tempo, key, energy, becomes a column you sort inside a crate rather than a second crate tree. Do every move inside Serato, never in Finder or Explorer, or tracks turn up missing.
Use columns, not more crates. Right-click the library header, tick BPM and Key, click BPM to sort by tempo, then hold Cmd or Ctrl and click Key to add it as a secondary sort. For something you want to keep, build a smart crate with a BPM rule instead. Setup, under Library and Display, has a Show Key As option that switches the key notation shown in the library. More on that in sort tracks by key in Serato.
Most working DJs run two layers. Genre gives them the top-level crates, because that is how a request and a room read. A second layer inside each crate handles the night itself: tempo, energy, or a color label. Anything a tag already answers gets handed to a smart crate, and hand-built crates are kept for gig-specific sets put together in the week before the booking.
Drag a crate slightly to the right, onto the name of another crate, and it becomes a subcrate. Drag it to the far left of the crate panel and it returns to the top level. In Serato DJ 4.0 you can also sort the crate list itself: click the sort label to pick Custom, Alphabetical or Date Added, and use the arrow to flip the direction. Favorite crates stay pinned at the top whatever you choose.
Separate the two jobs. On disk, keep a flat, boring folder structure you never reorganize, because DJ software points at file paths and breaks when they move. Inside the app, do the real organizing with tags and crates, where one track can sit in five places at once without a single file moving. Get Genre, BPM and key right once and every tool downstream can read them.
A smart crate is a crate filled by a rule instead of by dragging. Click Add Smart Crate, click Add Rule, pick a field such as Genre, BPM, Key, Year or Rating, then choose Contains, Is, Does not contain or Is not. Every track that matches appears in the crate, and new imports join on their own. Serato DJ Lite has had smart crates since version 4.0. Full walkthrough: set up smart crates in Serato.
There are three usual causes. On Serato DJ Pro 3.3.5 and below, Protect Library in Setup locks all file tags and crate names, so uncheck it. A track showing a lock icon is read-only at the file level, which is fixed in Finder or Explorer rather than in Serato. And filename, length, size, bit rate and sampling rate are never editable, because they are properties of the file rather than tags.
Almost always the rule and the tag do not match. A rule reads the exact text in the field, so Genre is House skips everything tagged Deep House: use Contains instead. Check that the Genre column is switched on and that those tracks actually carry a genre. If you set several rules, Match all of the following Rules means every rule has to hit at once. Blank fields are usually the real culprit; see clean up your Serato library.
Serato only reads the Genre tag that is already in the file; it never writes one for you. Vibes analyzes each track and suggests a vibe from how it sounds, imports the Genre, Mood and Grouping tags you already have, and lets you confirm a whole library with hotkeys. The result exports back into Serato as crates. Download Vibes, or see the same task in Rekordbox.

From a Vibes customer

The import worked perfectly. Have created several sets now and my life is so much easier
Danny

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Every step is checked against the current version of Serato DJ.

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Last reviewed June 2026.

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