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Apple Music Now Integrated With More DJ Apps
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I've been craving Retina support for Traktor for ages. Not holding out much hope of them supporting Apple Music!
That's precisely not how DJ's are using music subscriptions. They DOWNLOAD tracks BEFORE the gig, so they are all local. Nothing to do with having internet use during the gig.
Not better sound than CD's since lossless was introduced, or even better hi-res, both in the last two years.
So i just tested this out on Rekordbox and i can confirm you can add reverb etc, the only thing its missing compared to the likes of Tidal which iv been using for a couple of years now is Stems. I can now safely drop Tidal sub' which was only used for DJing (playing requests i don't have on SSD) and us AM as i already have a sub for that and don't need to pay extra for DJ software integration. (which i guess will come when Apple figure out everyone else does it)
I am a professional DJ, resident at Miami Bar, and looong-time Serato user. I can tell you that, in a professional DJ setting, streaming should absolutely never be used as a primary source of music. The main reasons they should be treated as purely nice-to-have are:
That being said, a somewhat exception to the rule are wedding DJs who have to cater unforeseen song requests. Even then, streaming is nothing more than a good to have.
- They are not reliable enough (failure rate around 5% I'd say for us club DJs). The fact that local caching of tracks is disabled or discouraged adds salt to injury.
- Their catalog is missing those special remixes, extended edits, or clean versions that us DJs prefer
That being said, a somewhat exception to the rule are wedding DJs who have to cater unforeseen song requests. Even then, streaming is nothing more than a good to have.
They censor the proper term. Gotta credit Paul Thurrott with that one. I think the more civil term is "platform degradation" but the real term is so much better.
If only lossless playback actually worked. Ever since it was introduced, a bug causes skipping whenever a track is streamed for the first time in a session. It's infuriating. I and many others have reported it to Apple, but they haven't done anything about it. It seems to be related to how Apple Music pre-caches the start of a song, then switches over to the downloaded portion. A small part of time in the song is literally skipped, it sounds like a CD skipping. When you hear it, you can't un-hear it, and being a musician I heard it right away. It doesn't happen when streaming lossy, only lossless...but since a part of the track is literally skipped, we can't really call this lossless can we? 🤷♂️
I refuse to use Spotify due to the way they treat musicians. But this is a joke. My cloud-hosted (Akamai) Plex server is able to serve me FLAC audio flawlessly and with less lag when selecting a song than Apple Music.
Beyond the idea that a DJ using streamed content is playing with fire, I wonder if they've fixed the lossless implementation when playing in these apps; DJs will not put up with skips in their tracks ... makes them sound bad and makes beat-matching impossible. It's gotta either be a) fixed, b) the service is limited to lossy quality, or c) there are going to be angry DJs soon.
DJs indeed require high-quality music; not necessarily lossless -- that may actually be a bad idea in certain scenarios -- but high quality mp3s should do just fine. The reason is not what most people think. DJs transform the music, they change the pitch and tempo all the time. High compression artifacts become more pronounced when doing so. A good example with Serato DJ is, using Pinch'n'Time, bring a 128kbps mp3 house track with intense baseline and drums down to -10% and listen to what happens.
Moreover, in most (club) settings, the sound system should actually be configured to mono, not stereo.
The only thing you cannot use is stem isolation.
Loop, pitch, key, effects - no problem.
I wanted to sign up for Tidal after Spotify support was dropped - alas, never available in my region.
Apple Music works a treat, but crate digging is a nightmare in comparison to Spotify, so still keep an account active to transfer new stuff that I'd otherwise never find.
Exactly what I was thinking. I used to VJ and I wouldn't be comfortable relying on an interent connection or whatever else such a setup would mean.
But if this is something that proffesional DJ software are incorporating into their products (I mean Serato is not just a side player in the scene) then it means there are DJs who might be interested in it, or even worse DJs who want this. And even if none of the DJs with some experience jump on this ship, you can bet that some new people on the scene after having this available will end up using this. I wonder if there will be enough problems for this to be scratched in the end.
Right that’s what i’m saying, they don’t want to have to deal with internet during the gig. Music is already on the USB.
Actually, to my ears most cds still sound better, though it may just be because the DACs in my disc players are better than the ones in my iPhone, Mac, and Apple TV.
For club audio, it's not gonna matter to anybody but the DJ's ears. Nobody else in the room is even close to being in an optimal listening situation, they won't hear the difference. 128k mp3 is more than good enough.
yeah, I do a broadcast show, so with that and home use there's a bit of a difference. Again, it's small, but if I have the disc I'll play that instead of the Apple Music stream 99% of the time, the exception being if my CD is an older unremastered version.
Completely agree this is infuriating and long overdue a fix. However it doesn’t skip if you download the track (i.e. hit d/l in apple music). Which guess would want to do anyway if DJing.
Not tried w dj apps but apple music lossless would be unusable with the skipping.
Roon integration would truly be great. And might give Roon extra subscribers if people had access to AM for their subscription music.
But AFAIR reading a while ago (I could be wrong though, so don't quote me on it!), the Roon devs have given such an idea a definite "never-going-to-happen", unfortunately (both AM & Spotify).
Whether that was due to technical reasons, licensing with Tidal/Qobuz/KKBox, or even simply not trusting Apple to randomly change things whenever they felt like it that Roon devs would possibly not be able to fix (or all three reasons); who knows? 🤷♂️
Yes, I know.
Roon and Apple were already in touch in the past. Unfortunately the deal was not reached because Apple wants a tight control about how the stream works.
Just to quote the issue from Roon reps:
I still hope that in a way or another the Roon-Apple Music matching will be done in the future. Mine was more a rant than an actual request.
Well found on the quote, thanks. Yes, maybe in future, or maybe not – depends whether Apple ease back on their control mechanisms. I suspect not, though, TBH.
This is incredible, I can’t believe it. No need to store tons of FLAC files anymore (assuming you’re using your own laptop to play instead of CDJs).
Up until now, Algoriddim’s djay was the only app that supported Apple Music, and it required a paid subscription to use it with a hardware controller. But now, I can just use rekordbox, which is essentially free if you own a Pioneer controller.
This is a major blow to Spotify btw, which used to be supported by DJ software a few years ago, but not anymore.
So glad I checked my RSS feeds today.
Up until now, Algoriddim’s djay was the only app that supported Apple Music, and it required a paid subscription to use it with a hardware controller. But now, I can just use rekordbox, which is essentially free if you own a Pioneer controller.
This is a major blow to Spotify btw, which used to be supported by DJ software a few years ago, but not anymore.
So glad I checked my RSS feeds today.
Haha true - i've been bringing that up constantly. It's horrible to sort music libraries out on that pixelater mess. We've been through two major versions and nothing.
Traktor 4 is just the exact same code base as Traktor 3 with a few features tacked in - i'm begining to think there's a lot of messy and legacy code in that app they don't know what to do with.