Hai.
* How do you get your playlists or collections of music into your DJ software?
iTunes xml hook
* Is is possible to update metadata through Musicbee and reimport into the DJ software in a relatively painless way? Or is this a concept that should be avoided?
Yes, most have a possibility to force 're-read' metadata
* How do you minimise the risk of the DJ software overwriting your metadata if your DJ tracks are part of your main music collection?
Here's the painful part... you first need to understand what the package you want to use does, and where it has data practice/handling oddities.
I've written a few python scripts that pick up and fix some of the bad metadata habbits for the packages I use.
This:
* How do you manage multiple genres as most(?) DJ SW does not support this.
Being one of them... as many mangle multi value metadata, and have been doing so since forever unfortunately, despite it being requested for a decade plus.
But hey, Serato has had requests to support Track Ratings from 1000s of users for 2 decades now...
And, they're still ignoring it. But, Serato is a lost cause on that imo...
Anyway, my hope is on Traktor, Denon and/or Mixxx to finally bite the bullet and support multi- & custom-value metadata natively... all I can suggest is - chime in on the threads about these, and file support requests. Only if users get vocal will manufacturers/devs consider new features.
Until then I'll only get by by having one parent library, and a few USB children in sync, and giving access to them only to write the prorietary Traktor/Serato fields to file, then fix them up before alllowing them back into the parent library.
So yea, not (average) user friendly, but easy/quick enough to do when you know how to fix up metadata via code/scripts and have a decent backup system [vital anyway - do NOT use 1 main library that you barely back up... otherwise you're in for a world of frustrations... even moreso if you use powerful tools, i.e MusicBee/Foobar or Python via Mutagen or taglib...].
c.