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damien's zone

Posts with #Apple Music

Audio in space

Ever since I first tried it shortly after its introduction, Dolby Atmos on Apple Music felt, to me, gimmicky at best and counterproductive at worst? It's like, either the effect is too noticeable and it's distracting or it just doesn't add anything when it just doesn't make a whole song fall flat? If that makes sense?

At any rate, I was having a normal evening and randomly decided to give it a try again, and boy do I have thoughts.

A little setup note: all my listening is being done on Apple Music on macOS 15.1.1, with AirPods Max, with the "Lossless (ALAC up to 24-bit/48kHz)" preset, "Dolby Atmos" set to "Always On" like so and "Spatial Audio" set to "Fixed" in macOS.
I also used the "Music Library Tracker" app on iOS to even find which tracks in my library were available in Spatial Audio! Truly bonkers that I need a 3rd party app to do that, but whatever.
Also, I'm putting embed codes for each track. I'm going to assume Dolby Atmos is not available when playing them from the web, but at least it'll be easy to open them in a native Apple Music app if you have that.

Anyway, here are my thoughts gathered after listening to a few Spatial Audio tracks from the ~630 available in my library. I will try to gather a relatively broad range of genres, but it's my own library, so there will be a clear bias lmao.

Kraftwerk - Trans-Europa Express / Metall Auf Metall / Abzug

I could write a poem about Kraftwerk's Trans-Europa Express, it is genuinely one of my favorite electronic music albums of all time, I think. And to be clear, I do not mean Trans-Europe Express, Kraftwerk shall be listened to in German…Read more

Apple Music music spatial audio