How to get surround sound out of Apple Music Spatial Audio?!

[OdysseyMusik]

See Dave’s post here; perhaps you need the Windows Dolby access app installed first

Thx!
I tried installing Windows Dolby Access, but iTunes still plays the Apple Spartial Music as stereo on my system....
I wonder how many on PC who can get the surround sound....

Only settings in Dolby Acces:

 

[Franck]

* Mac ---> USB multi-channel audio interface ---> multi-channel speakers (5.1, no height channels)
So you don't get the full Atmos.

And you don't get Atmos, either, when connected to HDMI / Receiver.

If you look in the Audio Midi utility, the biggest formats that OSX know are 5.1 and 7.1, so they need to fix this first. You have the same in Logic Pro X, you cannot master for more than 8 channels (ambisonic 2nd order is 9 channels). Other DAWs have way more channels than that. If you want to do Atmos on Logic Pro, there is a plugin that takes each track out of Logic Pro to the Renderer. A not optimum situation ( I just made a video about it)

As there are rumors that a new Logic Pro X is coming up with Spatial Audio, I hope these limitations will be removed.
That being said, in Apple Music, you can get an Atmos music stream, that will be rendered to 5.1 or 7.1 (the same way it gets rendered to binaural in headsets), this is way better than stereo.

If you don't have a 5.1 system, then Apple Music needs to know the speaker layout to optimize the rendering (and likely have some special speakers), this is why Atmos rendering is supported only on recent hardware.

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

Okay, some people have ripped Dolby Atmos music from Apple Music already, and according to my sources' screenshots, Taylor Swift is lossless Atmos.
Stored in an ALAC codec with Atmos metadata in an M4A container?
I was right the first time???
(We're talking about direct streaming service file ripping, which I will not touch because I'm a good boy.)

 

[Franck]

Okay, some people have ripped Dolby Atmos music from Apple Music already, and according to my sources' screenshots, Taylor Swift is lossless Atmos.
Stored in an ALAC codec with Atmos metadata in an M4A container?
I was right the first time???
(We're talking about direct streaming service file ripping, which I will not touch because I'm a good boy.)

I had a look in Apple Music, it is an mp4 file cut in segments for streaming. The segments are encrypted. So you cannot easily "rip it".

that being said consumer grade Atmos, is a 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus stream with JOC side metadata that allows to re-render up to 64 objects(? not the full 128 objects due to bandwidth issues) from the 5.1 stream. It can be in a variety of containers, including mp4. Therefore If your device does not understand Atmos, at least it can play the 5.1. This is what happens on my Mac.

 

[Cheezmo]

Okay, some people have ripped Dolby Atmos music from Apple Music already, and according to my sources' screenshots, Taylor Swift is lossless Atmos.
Stored in an ALAC codec with Atmos metadata in an M4A container?
I was right the first time???
(We're talking about direct streaming service file ripping, which I will not touch because I'm a good boy.)

Not enough information. How was it ripped? Without knowing the method, you can't know. I would find it very strange that if you download the Atmos version for offline playback you get a compressed version but the streaming version is lossless. They don't do that with the Hi-Res Lossless files. The downloaded Atmos files are way to small to be lossless, so again, need to know what method was used to "capture/rip" the stream and even then it could be lossy data packaged as ALAC at some internal stage where the ripping took place.

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

Not enough information. How was it ripped? Without knowing the method, you can't know. I would find it very strange that if you download the Atmos version for offline playback you get a compressed version but the streaming version is lossless. They don't do that with the Hi-Res Lossless files. The downloaded Atmos files are way to small to be lossless, so again, need to know what method was used to "capture/rip" the stream and even then it could be lossy data packaged as ALAC at some internal stage where the ripping took place.

AFAIK the files were grabbed on a jailbroken iOS device and then we're decrypted with a combination of keys and brute force. I'll ask for the exact details.

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

AFAIK the files were grabbed on a jailbroken iOS device and then we're decrypted with a combination of keys and brute force. I'll ask for the exact details.

I keep on proving myself wrong so from now on everyone just assume the Dolby Atmos is lossy because I am really, really dumb. @bracelis is right, everyone listen to him.