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.

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