As we reported yesterday, Algoriddim has added the Apple Music streaming service to its Djay Pro apps across all platforms: Windows, Android, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Vision Pro. This gives users of DJ software immediate access to 100 million tracks in Apple Music, a service that is second only to Spotify for user reach.
This is all great news. But what are the practical pros and cons, from the point of view of a typical user of Djay Pro, who uses the app in a couple of places, and who wants to now add Apple Music? From a morning playing with it, here’s what I have discovered…
iTunes/Music is part of the deal
So full disclosure: I’ve done all my testing on a MacBook and an iPhone, guessing the typical user to be an Apple fan (sorry, Windows and Android users of the app).
Thing is, we don’t actually advise DJs to use the Music app (formerly iTunes of course) that comes with Apple devices any more for music organisation here at Digital DJ Tips, finding that it causes a lot of problems and that it’s generally simpler just to use your DJ software to organise your music.
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This is a problem because those apps are precisely where the Apple Music streaming service lives. And additionally, they’re definitely part of the deal when using Djay Pro to sync your library. I’m guessing though that if you are a user of Djay Pro on Apple devices already, you’re already using the Music app for your DJ music, so assuming you are (and hold that thought), let’s look deeper.
Your music and streaming music, together
The reason this is important is that unlike any other streaming service, Apple Music blurs the lines between the music you own and the music that you stream from its service. It’s all there inside the iTunes/Music app, muddled together. You can make playlists and so on, and the app doesn’t care whether it’s your music or music that you’ve added to your library from the streaming service.
What’s more, that library’s going to look the same on your iPhone, your iPad, your Mac at work, your MacBook at home and anywhere else. As long as you’ve got sync turned on, you’ll see not only all your own music, but also all your streaming music and your playlists, the same everywhere.
The big new thing is that Algoriddim’s Djay Pro software has got a new Apple Music tab on it, which shows you all the music you own and all the music you’ve added to your streaming library, which sounds brilliant – and to an extent, it is.
You can load music and play music, and it won’t care whether you own that music or whether it’s coming from the streaming service. It’s all there in your playlists, the way you’ve organised it, in the same tabs that you see on all your other devices.
The usual streaming restrictions apply…
There are some drawbacks. There’s no stems (or Neural Mix, as Algoriddim calls it). You can’t record. This is all because streaming services don’t allow this, but the problem here is that because your own music is all mixed up with your streaming music, it means you can’t use stems or record even though you may be playing songs that you already own!
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That’s a shame, and I think Algoriddim should find a way of differentiating between songs that you already own that just happen to be coming across this way to your device, and songs that you are only streaming, so that if you’re playing a set of songs that are yours from Apple Music, all these functions work.
The “Local Music” workaround
There is a workaround, however. There is a tab called Local Music on every Djay Pro app, and that contains all the music, playlists, and so on that you’ve actually downloaded to that device on that device’s Music app.
So, for instance, on a MacBook, if you’ve opened the Music app (formerly iTunes), any songs that you own that you’ve made sure are downloaded and on that device’s hard drive, will now show in the Local Music tab on Djay Pro. From here, you can play them without those restrictions.
Even better, say you now open the Music app on your iPhone, go to a playlist that contains music that you own, and download that locally to that device. The next time you open the Djay Pro app on that device, you can go to that same Local Music tab and all those songs will show there as well, and you can play from there in the same way.
It’s a reasonably good way of getting to that music – but those playlists are now appearing in two places on Djay Pro, as are those songs – one place you can play them restricted, one place you can play them unrestricted, so it is still all a bit clunky.
I would like to see, if they can’t turn off the restrictions on music played via the Apple Music tab in Djay Pro that you own, that they at least give an option to stop the Apple Music library showing the music you own entirely, so you can have a clear differentiation between streamed and owned music in two tabs within the app.
Other points of note
You can now auto mix Apple Music for the first time, because of course Djay Pro has got Auto Mix, which is nice. Probably better than that though, is the fact that at least on Apple devices, metadata syncs between devices. So if I put cue points and loops on a track on one device, they show on the other. I’m not sure whether that was there before, but I suspect it wasn’t, and anyway, it definitely is now, and I liked that.
One thing I did miss was that there’s no refresh button on the Apple Music implementation, so sometimes to get the playlists to update, I had to just quit the app and load it again. I might be wrong there, it might refresh after a while, but I couldn’t get it to work immediately. Just a little button to refresh the service might be nice in the app itself.
The infamous iTunes Match bug…
So the biggest problem I have with this whole thing is an old one, and it’s not Algoriddim’s fault, more a fault of the way Apple handles your personal music library when you want to sync it to the cloud.
Back in the day, Apple launched something called iTunes Match, which was revolutionary. It took your library, whether it was one song or 100,000 songs, and it allowed you to put the whole lot in the cloud for a very small subscription (which nowadays is all folded into the Apple Music subscription).
This meant that, as I’ve already explained, whatever device you opened your library on, you’d see everything. Nowadays it means you’ll see all your playlists from the Apple Music streaming service, but you’ll also see all your local music. In other words, this gives you a personal music cloud alongside the Apple Music.
Apple has never fixed this
But there’s a massive downside. Say you’ve got a song which is not the standard version of that song, which of course is something DJs always have: It could be a song that you’ve cleaned up to take some curse words out of, or it could be a version of a song from a download pool that’s easier to mix, whatever.
In this instance, there is a chance that Apple will not give you that exact version of that song on other devices. It thinks it knows best and replaces that version with the standard version. Now this is annoying, but also you could end up losing the versions of the songs that matter to you in the worst circumstances.
I always hated this feature, and I wish there were a way of turning it off. It is a single thing that means I’ll never consider using Apple’s music sync function to keep my own music synced across devices.
It’s not Algoriddim’s fault
And that’s my biggest problem with Algoriddim’s Djay Pro software, because this is the way they suggest you to sync your music, and no DJ in the world is going to be happy when they find the version of a song that they want has been switched by Apple for something else in the background, automatically. Doesn’t matter how often or not this happens – once is too much.
I’m pretty sure if you asked Algoriddim, they’d say that you can get around this by plugging a wire between your master computer and the iPhone or iPad that you want to use your library on and sync it that way, but that’s not cloud sync. That’s really old school sync. And there has to be a better way than this.
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Finally…
As I said near the beginning of this article, if you are bought into this software and bought into Apple’s ecosystem, you’ve probably dealt with this one or come up with some kind of workaround that you’re happy with already by now. This doesn’t detract from the fact that this is a major DJ streaming service that’s been added for the first time to any DJ software. And for a lot of people, I suspect it will be great news.
Let’s hope that as this beds in, Algoriddim can find some ways around some of the niggles. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll find a way around the Apple music sync issue that I know has stopped a lot of DJs going near this up until this point.
I would love to know how you use this, what your views on it are, whether you will be using it, and whether this new version of the software has changed the way that you sync your music. So please share in the comments and ask any questions as well. We’d love to hear from you.
Phil Morse
