Any MacBook Pro in the last 5 years should be good enough for DJing, only because playing back audio takes very little power. All MacBook Pros should far exceed the needs of a DJ. You just need to make sure that you get internal storage big enough for all of your music and DJ applications while leaving about 10% disk space free, and enough RAM to run all the DJ apps you want to run simultaneously. You could probably DJ just fine on a MacBook Air, but you might prefer the larger screen on a MacBook Pro so that there's more room on screen to spread out your decks and playlists.
Dj App Mac Apple Music Player
And that probably violates the license between Apple and the music labels. Perhaps there are other DJ apps that play the music in a more straight-forward way. The Sonos app, which is used to pipe music to a Sonos speaker set, does allow Apple Music songs to stream. Serato DJ now lets you stream SoundCloud and TIDAL music from right inside the software - but did you know there was a way of getting your playlists in from App.
MusicKit lets users play Apple Music and their local music library natively from your apps and now websites. When a user provides permission to their Apple Music account, your app can create playlists, add songs to their library, and play any of the millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog. If your app detects that the user is not yet an Apple Music member, you can offer a trial from. Pacemaker provides an easy to use DJ app for all DJs and seamlessly integrates with both your music library and Spotify, giving you instant access to millions of tracks. You can create mixes by selecting track by track or simply pick a playlist and let our AI DJ (Automix) create a perfect seamless mix for you. Preview, buy and download Karaoke music from your favorite artists on iTunes. You'll also get new recommendations based on your past Karaoke music purchases and so much more.
The Retina is the latest, in many ways the fastest and most powerful MacBook Pro ever made...with a MacBook Pro Retina, no DJ on Earth will have a better Apple laptop than you, seriously. And if those other DJs really have PowerBook G4s (which have not been manufactured for almost 10 years), the MacBook Pro is many MANY times more powerful than those old G4.s
Allen Pike, one of the developers behind WeddingDJ and the excellent Party Monster, has written on the new issues introduced with Apple Music for third-party media apps:
According to our latest stats, 17% of Party Monster users have been unable to play a song in their iTunes library, and 22% of WeddingDJ users have tried to cue a playlist that has so many unplayable tracks that we need to display a warning. While it’s a miracle that we’ve been able to maintain a 4 star rating through all of this, it’s not going to last if we stay the course.
Given all of this, we have a couple options. We could double down and go pro, catering to serious DJs who can load DRM-free music into our sandbox. Pro DJs who use our apps often have a large licensed library of songs, and won’t rely on iTunes Match or Apple Music.
Alternatively, we could steer towards the mass market, drop crossfading support, and regain full iTunes compatibility. We could also put in the work to add support for Spotify or other competing streaming services, and focus our apps less on playback features and more on having a great UI for queueing.
Dj App Mac Apple Music Maker
The standard iOS media player has never given a lot of freedom to third-party developers. I wonder if Apple Music with its “love” system could be even more of an excuse for Apple not to make the media player APIs more flexible. Not to mention, of course, DRM.