There was a time where my inner untamed lemming would hammer in reams of verbiage berating the DJ industry for not having their assorted softwares purring nicely in time for the release of Apple’s latest and great version of OS X or macOS. But times have changed, and thanks to a few industry conversations informing just how fraught Apple’s updates are (literally changing something huge at the last-minute is not unknown), my lemming no longer spews shit in their general direction.
And with the impending and somewhat major update of macOS to 10.15 aka Catalina, the first “for the love of God don’t update just yet” PR has arrived. Serato is first out of the starting blocks:
macOS 10.15 Catalina – not yet supported in Serato DJ Pro or Serato DJ Lite
macOS 10.15 Catalina is currently in BETA, but is not yet supported for use with Serato DJ Pro, or Serato DJ Lite.
We strongly recommend you do not update until we announce support
We have been performing tests with BETA releases of macOS 10.15 Catalina, and have noticed significant issues, which we are currently working through.
We hope to announce support for macOS 10.15 Catalina in both Serato DJ Pro & Serato DJ Lite after the public release of macOS 10.15 Catalina.
It may be worth disabling automatic updates, to avoid potentially clicking the “Install update” button in the macOS pop-up notification, via System Preferences –> App Store –> Automatically check for updates (uncheck)
THIS IS A BIGGIE
With Catalina comes the death of iTunes aka that tool that oh so many of us use to play music and manage their music libraries. Not everyone of course (I could feel people about to take to their keyboards to unload hate on iTunes), but it is nonetheless a massive change to manage. In reality it could be a very simple switch and sorted in a few lines of code. Alternatively however it could be a Herculean task requiring much juggling inside the DJ software’s framework.
Needless to say, this is a quantum shift that needs to be managed very carefully. So for this reason alone, even I would recommend holding off throwing your DJ Mac at Catalina, and just waiting a few weeks. It’s not like Catalina is likely to bring anything of significance to your DJ life anyway, so waiting is just a matter of harnessing your own inner lemming rather than actually missing out on anything. If the past OS X and macOS updates have thought me anything, it’s that the thrilled and excited demos dished out by Craig Federighi and his Apple chums at the keynotes never quite measures up to reality.
Obviously some will pay no heed to such warnings and will update anyway. Hell I probably will too, but only if Adobe CC works, because that’s more important to my business. And it’ll be come clear quite quickly if things are fine or truly fubarred. The forums will be littered with update related abuse regardless of the torrent of warnings not to update. T’was ever thus. The collective voice of inner lemmings tends to drown out the sultry voice of common sense.