Apple Music Comes To Serato, Rekordbox, EngineDJ, AlphaTheta…

Apple has today announced DJ with Apple Music, a major new venture enabling DJs to use Apple Music as a music subscription service for DJing as well as for day-to-day listening and music discovery.

In simultaneous announcements from some of the world’s biggest DJ software and hardware manufacturers, Apple Music was confirmed to have been added to Serato and Rekordbox laptop DJ platforms, and into standalone DJ gear from Denon DJ, Numark, and AlphaTheta.

Laptop and standalone

For laptop DJs, Apple Music slots in alongside existing subscription services such as Tidal, Beatport, Beatsource, SoundCloud and Amazon Music, working in a similar way – much as it was added to Algoriddim’s Djay Pro software last year. Users need simply update their DJ software to the latest version. Rekordbox iOS/iPadOS users will also find it has been added to their apps.

For standalone equipment users, Apple Music is now available via a firmware update to the AlphaTheta XDJ-AZ and Omnis Duo, the Denon DJ Prime 4+, SC Live 4 (and SC Live 2), the Prime Go+, and Numark’s Mixstream Pro Go and Mixstream Pro+.

Frequently Asked Questions

As a DJ school, we hear from thousands of our students with questions on all aspects of maintaining and building music collections for DJing. Here are some of the questions that our students will want answers to and that you may well also be asking yourself:

Is it available for Traktor, VirtualDJ etc?

Not that we know of at this time – just Serato and Rekordbox (and Djay Pro, which got it first a few months back).

Is it available for my XDJ-XZ, Opus Quad, SC6000, XDJ-RX3, Prime 4, Numark Mixstream Pro, Prime 2, Prime Go etc…
No, the only standalone hardware supported is that which we have mentioned explicitly above.

Can I use stems features with it?
While we haven’t exhaustively tested this, we’re going to guess that no, it won’t be possible to use any stems functionality with these integrations.

I keep my personal, owned music in Apple Music. Will it sync that too?
Yes it will if you enable library syncing in the cloud in Apple Music, offering the intriguing possibility (for some, at least) of keeping all your music alongside your streaming playlists accessible via one service.

Will I still need the internet to use it?

At this point, yes – none of the Apple Music integrations offer an offline locker as far as we know.

Any advantages to using Apple Music over the other services?
If it’s the one you use already, it makes sense – no need for a second sub. This will be the big reason for many. But also, there are curated playlists in a new DJ category, and you can sync your own tunes in the same way (see above).

But all have their strengths and weaknesses, so you should still try them to find what works best for you.

Can I pre-analyse my music and add cues etc, like I do with my own tracks?
You can in Rekordbox. That means if you use any of the compatible Rekordbox laptop controllers or standalone units, you can prepare your playlists and cue points, connect to the Rekordbox cloud, and access them while DJing. This works across all streaming services Rekordbox is compatible with, not just Apple Music.

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However, you will still need to download the songs as you need them, as there is no offline locker, so this won’t work over USB – just CloudDirectPlay.