If you are a DJ like me who still uses a Rane 61/62/64 in 2022, you probably know that MacOS High Sierra is the latest Mac operating system which can run the system preferences pane correctly. MacOS Mojave does not display the sliders in the preferences pane properly and the preferences pane does not work AT ALL with MacOS Catalina. Don’t even try to use a MacOS newer than this.

I recently purchased a brand new 2018 Macbook Pro 15″ 2.6GHz / 32GB RAM / 512GB SSD / AMD Radeon 560x sealed in box, from Ebay. I did this specifically to be able to run my hardware flawlessly.

Well, weirdly enough, the machine came with MacOS Mojave installed, even though these machines initially were released with High Sierra. It’s important to know that these machines CAN run High Sierra, but getting this installed is no small feat.

If you try to get High Sierra from the App Store https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683 as your normally would, it will download build 17G66 and this will NOT work with these machines. When you try to boot from the USB, you will get the circle with a slash icon which means it’s a Mac OS version which your machine can’t use.

What you need to do is find the old 17G2208 build of High Sierra which Apple unfortunately no longer offers from their servers. This version was specifically made for these machines only. I was able find the 17G2208 build on the Internet after a lot of scouring, so I’ve uploaded a link to the correct installer so you don’t have to search for hours like I did: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h7Z2fXRNNoang6wJ-FvcPYVXIkMxPctT/

The steps to get this to work are a little tricky, so I’ll take you through the entire process here:

Step 1: Download the .dmg from the link above

Step 2: Download the Mac Deploy Stick free software from https://twocanoes.com/products/mac/mac-deploy-stick/ and install it.

Step 3: Go to the Apple Menu, click on System Preferences, then Security & Privacy, and click on the Privacy tab. You need to click on “Full Disk Access” and add the MDS application.

Step 4: Next, double click to open the .dmg so it mounts on your desktop.

Step 5: Insert a blank USB thumb drive into your mac or erase an existing one in Disk Utility and format it as needed.

Step 6: Open the MDS software, click “Create Bootable Installer” from the left hand side, click “Select MacOS Installer” and navigate to the mounted “Install MacOS High Sierra” image. Also select your USB stick as the Target Volume in MDS.

Step 7: Once MDS has completed making the bootable installer, restart your MacBook Pro holding down the option key, and select the High Sierra Installer.

Step 8: The 17G2208 build of High Sierra has a software certificate which is now expired, so if you try to initiate the install, you will get an error which states “This copy of the Install macOS.app application is damaged, and can’t be used to install macOS.” You can easily get around this by temporarily resetting your system’s date back to early 2019. You can do so by going to Terminal and typing in the following command:

date -u 0507192419 

This sets your machine in the install process to UTC time to May 7th, 2019 19:24. (Don’t worry, your system will have the correct date after the install is complete.)

Now, you can install as normal.

Step 9: Once the machine finishes loading the 17G2208 build of High Sierra, you have a fully working version of High Sierra on your Mac! Be sure to do all the needed updates from the Apple Menu and App Store, and then you are all set.

Note: The last version of Serato DJ Pro that can use these mixers is 2.5.7, even though Serato tells you it’s 2.5.5. But anything newer will not connect. So you can get the 2.5.7 version here: https://serato.com/dj/pro/downloads/2.5.7

If you have any questions about this, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to help!