Apple Music to get Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos, lossless audio starting June

Apple has announced two major updates for Apple Music subscribers — Dolby Atmos support and lossless audio.

Apple Music has announced support for high-quality spatial audio with support for Dolby Atmos. It has also announced that it will be making its catalogue of more than 75 million songs available in Lossless Audio for subscribers.

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These new features will be available for Apple Music subscribers starting next month at no additional cost, it has said.

“Apple Music is making its biggest advancement ever in sound quality,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats.

“Listening to a song in Dolby Atmos is like magic. The music comes from all around you and sounds incredible. Now we are bringing this truly innovative and immersive experience to our listeners with music from their favourite artists like J Balvin, Gustavo Dudamel, Ariana Grande, Maroon 5, Kacey Musgraves, The Weeknd, and so many more. Subscribers will also be able to listen to their music in the highest audio quality with Lossless Audio.”

By default, Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, as well as the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The platform will also constantly be adding new Dolby Atmos tracks and curate a special set of Dolby Atmos playlists for listeners.

“Apple Music is working with artists and labels to add new releases and the best catalogue tracks, as more artists begin to create music specifically for the Spatial Audio experience,” it said.

For lossless audio, the tech giant uses ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) “to preserve every single bit of the original audio file.”

“This means Apple Music subscribers will be able to hear the exact same thing that the artists created in the studio,” it said.

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Subscribers will have to install the latest version of Apple Music to start listening to lossless audio. They can turn on lossless audio from Settings, under the Audio Quality option in Music. Apple Music will also offer Hi-Resolution lossless all the way up to 24 bit at 192 kHz, it said.

Multiple audio platforms such as Amazon and Spotify are adopting lossless audio as a standard. Amazon has announced today that it will remove the additional fee for Amazon Music HD available to Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers (via Billboard). Spotify, earlier this year, had also announced a new premium subscription offering for listeners called Spotify HiFi. Spotify HiFi is a lossless tier that will provide Hi-Fi audio upgrade to listeners enabling them to listen to CD-quality audio on their devices.

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