In what may be seen as a slightly bizarre move, Serato has continued to add compatibility with long-discontinued non-Serato DJ gear to its DJ software, announcing today that Serato DJ 3.3.2 works with the 12-year-old Pioneer DJ DDJ-RB controller and the 16-year-old Traktor Kontrol Z2 mixer.
Owners of either of these devices – assuming that you still know where yours is and it still works – will find that Serato recognises the sound cards in these and is mapped so that you can use the controls as if the units were native Serato kit, meaning you have the choice now of using Serato instead of the Traktor and Rekordbox platforms that these units were originally designed to support.
However, news like this will inevitably raise eyebrows among those whose previously official Serato hardware no longer works with the current versions of the platform, gear that includes the Rane SL2-4 and Sixty series mixers, the Numark NS7, NS7II, the Allen & Heath Zone:DB2&4, and so on.
So why are they doing this?
From a business point of view, this kind of makes sense because it’s like long-forgotten hit records being licensed on the cheap to compilation albums: The labels have got all the money out of them they wanted and are just servicing the long tail. Serato sells manufacturers the rights to be compatible with its software for new gear, but of course for older gear, those times are long gone. Put another way, it would make no sense to just make Serato compatible with anything that comes out today because of course, why would manufacturers ever pay Serato any money at all were they to do this?
From a practical point of view, adding old controllers is not difficult when they are simple devices like these, and so it’s not going to cause any sleepless night for Serato’s engineers to quickly make such kit compatible.
The most curious thing is maybe that Serato’s PR machine springs into life for such announcements with new version numbers and so on based around something which presumably is going to appeal to a relatively small number of people, when maybe you’d expect such announcements to be footnotes to bigger product updates.
Anyway, if you happen to be a DDJ-RB or Kontrol Z2 user, you can grab Serato 3.3.2 now.
