I’ve been a professional DJ for majority of my life and I usually get my music through DJ pools, other DJ’s and if needed, YouTube. Until recently I’ve never used Apple Music, but a coworker gave me access and my music library has never been the same.
First off, almost anything you want is on Apple Music, even old school music you thought was lost forever. Now here’s my problem… I can’t use any of it when I’m DJ’ing a wedding or function using my software of choice (which is Traktor). I can use it for background music which is great, but for everything else, not so easy.
Fortunately there’s a website called Google that allows us to type issues into it and solutions appear, even if there are millions of solutions and its up to us to sort through which ones work and don’t work. During that process I discovered an application called Tuneskit. I also found another called Noteburner but I couldn’t get it to work correctly. Here’s my first hand experience with it:
Downloaded Tuneskit here. I used the demo to see if it even worked. The process was pretty simple. First you need to go to Apple Music, find a song that you like and download it. In the pretty simple interface of Tuneskit select Load iTunes Library and you’re entire library will be displayed. Select the playlist or song that you downloaded, click on it and then press ADD at the lower right section of the interface. Then a converter list will appear with the songs you selected. Now it’s important to note that you will need to select an output path of where you want to save your song. Once selected click CONVERT. Now the only bad thing about this app is that it’s literally capturing the song in real time, so if it’s a 4 minute song it will take… 4 minutes to convert the song. Not entirely bad, but would have been nice to know that going in.
After that, your song is converted. I took an entire playlist of smooth instrumentals, downloaded the whole list and before I went to bed, converted the whole list. Now on the plus side, it keeps all the information associated with that song, song title, artist, album artwork so that parts pretty cool.
I’ve only just purchased TunesKit yesterday, and I should point out if you use the unregistered version, it will only record 1/3 of the song. (small detail I overlooked). It’s $40 which all things considered is not a bad way to thank the developers for making life easier.
For many of us old school DJ’s, I remember when we first went digital we needed to record each song in real time into Sound Forge or Wavelab so this makes that process a little easier. Now when you’re using TunesKit, you won’t be able to listen to audio on your computer as the process creates a new audio source that converts it to self-record. Again, minor caveat.
Overall, very useful application for DJ’s that want to use Apple Music songs in their sets using native programs like Traktor or Serato. Hope this helps!