Pioneer MEP-7000 review

I've owned the MEP 7000 for a while now. Nice piece of equipment with a few needed improvements. My beef is mainly the lack of compatibility with iPods. The dream of plugging in an iPod and DJing as you would with CDs or a computer has yet to be truly realized.

Pioneer's MEP 7000 is about the closest thing to a true plug and play iPod "friendly" DJ device I have found. It works with some but not all iPods and does a good job of allowing the user to pull up songs and play them as you would a track from a CD, computer or any other source without having to further process or reconfigure your library. It recognizes a large variety of formats such as WAV, AAC, MP3 and AIFF. Loops, tempo changes and sound effects work perfectly. Even creating an internal playlist on the fly is a snap.

Here's the catch: The MEP is limited to recognizing no more than 100 iTunes playlists. And they seem to appear in no particular order. Any DJ worth their salt has way more playlists than this low minimum and needs to be able to access them in some orderly fashion. While Pioneer's marketing department will tout their MEP 7000 as compatible with iPod in order to garner more sales, Pioneer's support department sneers at the thought of their $1,500.00 player being interfaced with such a "toy". When asked about iPod compatibility and limitations, the mantra of "We don't support the iPod" and a referral to one of their repair centers or their online support forum is standard policy.

Indeed, a large part of the DJ community looks down upon the iPod as a music storage source even though it's reliability and ability to categorize and store a large amount of music in a small space remains unchallenged. I guess once you've spent hundreds on a nice laptop computer and Serato or other DJ software, you don't want someone with "only" an iPod beat mixing songs just as well as you. Just as owning the most expensive components does not a great DJ make, using an iPod does not make one any less skillful. For the record, I have both Serato and a late model Macbook Pro but still find the simplicity of using an iPod appealing.

The MEP's limited ability to pull up iTunes created playlists is a frustrating fly in an otherwise radiant ointment. Well, that and the MEP's lack of a basic echo effect. A workaround here is that Pioneer saw fit to let users search by Artist, Song, Album and GENRE. In my opinion, "Genre" is probably the most unused way to search for songs. This all but useless search category can be changed into a powerful playlist search tool.

In iTunes, if you change the Genre of every tune in a particular playlist, you can then find the all songs in one place on the MEP. For example, if you have an iTunes playlist called "Classic Rock", you can go to that playlist, highlight ALL songs then go to FILE, then GET INFO. A MULTIPLE ITEM INFORMATION window will pop up. At the bottom is the GENRE box. Just type in "Classic Rock" and click OK. Now when you update your iPod and plug it into the MEP you can choose GENRE and then CLASSIC ROCK. All your songs from that iTunes playlist will be there, albeit not necessarily in the order you had them in the original playlist. They will be listed alphabetically by artist. While not a perfect solution, it adds to the ability to use iTunes playlists with the iPod.

The MEP seems to be able to handle just over a hundred gigs of music from an iPod Classic, which is considerable. Once that threshold is passed the MEP may no longer recognize the iPod. By choosing the iTunes option to convert larger song files to 128 AAC format on the iPod, it significantly reduces the size of the total library. In my case, this conversion took my iPod library from 106 gigs (over 17,000 songs) down to just 60 gigs! The MEP again recognized the iPod and functionality was just as before. Audiophiles may hem and haw about lower bit rates and sound quality but in a room of party people, dancing and ambient noise, the difference is negligible.

Don't expect Pioneer to volunteer any of the above information as their tech support people apparently aren't even aware of it. Until a dedicated plug and play iPod DJ interface is created this will have to do. Pioneer makes it just workable enough to get by without fully acquiescing to the popularity and demand created by millions of worldwide Apple iPod devotees. If Pioneer can reconcile their love/hate relationship with the iPod, perhaps a future firmware update will increase usability (as well as add the currently inexplicable lack of an echo function) but this remains to be seen. The last firmware update provided by Pioneer was in 2009 so any future improvements, if any, may take a while.