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A selector's guide to building a lossless crate

Folder structure, tagging, backups, and why your USB stick deserves WAV over 320 — a practical setup guide for working selectors.

Robert Brown

Founder, Root Wave International

8 min read

Most selectors we talk to have the same problem: years of purchases scattered across three drives, half of them named 'track (1) final FINAL.mp3'. A crate you can actually trust under pressure starts with a folder structure you'll still understand in five years.

Structure before tags

We recommend one top folder per artist, one subfolder per release, and the release folder named with the year up front — '2026 — Gravity Riddim' sorts itself. Tags can drift or get stripped by an app update; a sane folder name never does.

Inside each release folder, keep the WAV as your working copy and export a 320 MP3 sibling for the USB stick that lives in the car or the gig bag. If a rig only reads MP3, you're never caught without a backup format on hand.

Backups, twice

One backup is a maybe. Two, in different locations, is a policy. Keep a full copy on an external drive at home and a second copy somewhere off-site — cloud storage is fine for this, since these are small, compressible files.

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WRITTEN BY

Robert Brown

Founder, Root Wave International

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