[alisonatwork]

I let this thread go for a while, but just saw your reply and wanted to say thanks for your insight! I am a hobbyist DJ for whom "playing out" just means "on a friend's equipment from time to time" so I probably don't need to fuss as much as I do, but your experience has kinda reaffirmed for me that keeping stuff MP3 is going to be the least hassle.

It really used to annoy me that bringing along just a USB left me with a useless "filenames only" view on old CDJs, and then even when they did read the file they only cached the metadata of a fraction of the tags, which is how I ended up same as you - custom genres with modifiers in the comment. It's not the ideal data structure for organizing your collection at home, but it seems to work the best for bringing music to go.