Don’t Upgrade to Itunes 12.2 Alert
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Leading DJ tech portals including DJtechtools and digitaldjtips.com are warning DJs to steer clear of Apple’s new version of Itunes (12.2) after numerous massive problems emerged related to the streaming-friendly version’s incompatibility with Traktor and Rekordbox and other DJ software systems.
“Don’t upgrade to iTunes 12.2 – or at least, do so with the greatest of care. It may well change your music files to DRM, change your track artwork, alter your tags, and more,” digitaldjtips.com editor Phil Morse advised.
“”Don’t take the risk”,” he stressed, “If you have, then we advise turning off all sharing, cloud and “Share details about your library with Apple” options.”
DJTechtools similarly warned of ‘major issues with all major DJ software’ with Itunes’ new streaming system in particular posing a particularly dire danger.
“If you lose all of your music and rely on the iTunes cloud backup, all of the matched files will be DRM locked – which will make it impossible to load them into a DJ software,” they pointed out.
US music business lawyer Ari Engel from De Novo Music Management highlighted the same issue in a letter posted by industry commentator Bob Lefsetz.
” iTunes is also scanning peoples libraries, adding DRM to songs that are personally owned (i.e.: songs put into iTunes via a CD import) and even changing the artwork on some of those songs. I’m not sure this is even legal,” he noted, directing readers to a related post on CultofMac.com.
“Turned on, iCloud Music Library is taking the music you rightfully own and place in your iTunes library and automatically adding DRM protection to it. In essence, it’s placing a lock on music that’s already yours,” George Tinari wrote on the blog.
“Additionally, if you cancel your Apple Music subscription, you lose access to all of your music whether you ripped it and added it yourself or not,” he added.
On Pioneer DJ’s Rekordbox DJ software, one problem the Itunes upgrade results in is playlists and folders disappearing on the DJ software and being lumped into single months.
Pioneer DJ similarly urged delaying if at all possible.
“Many issues have been reported when using the latest iTunes 12.2 with rekordbox since its release,”Pioneer DJ noted, “Please refrain from updating iTunes to the latest 12.2 in the meantime.”
