After sixteen years of service, iTunes has received a death knell on the latest Mac OSX update.
The Apple program that has served as a home for many an extensive music collection since its introduction in 2003 will no longer be available on the Catalina system update. iTunes will be replaced by separate apps for music, video and other services to focus on the streaming services that Apple has been developing over recent years.
Whilst iTunes has faced issues of failing relevancy since the introduction of Apple Music and the streaming boom, it marks a major loss for the many fanatics who’ve spent years arranging and re-arranging their music collection by genre and sub-genre and is the end of a music downloads era.
Beyond symbolism, however, the loss of iTunes holds ramifications for DJs. As The Verge reports, the new Music app does not have XML file support which means DJs are unable to export the library file that is used by software such as Pioneer’s Rekordbox to organise and arrange music collections. Apple’s current advice is for people who require the XML file is to avoid the Catalina update until the software developers themselves facilitate the capability.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that Apple has been at odds with musicians and music fans alike. The 2016 removal of USB ports from Mac laptops saw DJs, laptop musicians and creatives across the board drowning in a sea of costly adapters and dongles. Also that year, the tech giant removed earphone jacks from the iPhone, thereby generating more cost and even more adapters for users.
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