Your own content in Apple Spatial Audio

QuadraphonicQuad

Help Support QuadraphonicQuad:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

zeerround

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
QQ Supporter
Joined
Apr 11, 2010
Messages
923
Maybe others know this but... I've discovered you can play 5.1 flacs and Dolby Digital, including Atmos, in Apple Spatial Audio on iPhone/iPad with AirPods, Beats, etc., with head tracking.

(AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, AirPods (3rd generation), or Beats Fit Pro with Spatial Audio turned on)

I was looking at this link on apps that support spatial audio: All the Apps That Support Apple's Spatial Audio Feature

And noticed "FE File Explorer Pro" ($4.99 US one time)

With that app you can listen to tracks on your device or from iCloud, Google Drive, Box, DrobBox, NAS, Windows, Mac, etc. etc.

Here are some examples, all working in FE File Explorer Pro:

h**ps://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gvWCRdnlEYyLCe_pOsLxrA91imnCpPfi?usp=sharing

There is also a ReadMe.txt that lists formats I have discovered that work and don't work.

1668270502781.png


Enjoy...
 
An update:

If you are getting dolby atmos to properly play you will actually see FE Dolby Atmos:

1668620433798.png


If playing multi channel files, or if the Dolby content is getting decoded as multichannel (7.1 max) instead of atmos you will see:

1668620589586.png


If playing stereo, or it the dolby content is getting decoded as stereo, instead of atmos, you will see:

1668620652553.png


FYI to see these screens (and Spatial Audio Options) swipe up from the bottom of your display to get the control panel (iPhone) or swipe diagonally down from upper right corner (iPad) to get the control panel:

1668620847317.png


Then hold down the volume control slider.

Re Atmos content with Video, it seems to be that some files decode with full atmos and others don't. I have reached out to FE File Explorer support and they replied with some Dolby test files (some of which work and some which don't) so I pointed that out and haven't heard back again.

So far only (some) mp4 files are working with full Dolby Digital Plus Atmos are being fully decoded. Other containers (mkv, ts, etc. decode to stereo).

I do have a working combination of muxer software/commands if you are doing that kind of thing I can provide details and it would be good to have more people testing.
 
I'd also be interested in what people think of Apple's Spatial Audio with Head tracking, now that we can play Channel IDs/our own content.

e.g. for me, front, side, and front height all are well separated but nothing is coming from behind me (rears and rear heights coming from sides and mid heights).
 
Glad you're keeping track of this, @zeerround. I haven't tried the FE app yet, but I would just note that the MacRumors article you linked to is rather outdated (2021), as one of its caveats--"Note that spatial audio is not supported by any Mac model"--no longer applies. Newer MacBook Pros, for instance, certainly support spatial audio. (I'm brand-new to Mac, but spatial audio may even be built into the latest MacOS?)

Sidenote: just last night I was listening (on my AirPods Pro, linked to my MacBook Pro) to an "Immersive Audio 101" webinar on the website of the P&E Wing of the Recording Academy; the audio was clearly taking advantage of spatial audio with head tracking. When I tried listening to the same webinar on the P&E Wing's YouTube channel, it was plain-vanilla stereo--maybe even mono.
 
My understanding is theoretically any mutlichannel signal, when using Airpods, kicks on the Spatial Audio binaural downmix. Theoretically playing multichannel FLACs though a VLC server would achieve the same thing for free
 
Not from what I've seen. Unless you mean all spatial audio = binaural, 'cause it comes into the airpods as two channels.

That is true, but I'm talking about what iOS is telling you about what decoder it's using to feed the spatial audio.

Dolby Atmos - up to 16 channels and objects feeding spatial audio
multi channel - up to 7.1 channels feeding spatial audio
Stereo - 2 channels feeding spatial audio

and - multi channel and Dolby Atmos only work in apps that are spatial audio enabled.

I haven't tried getting a multi-channel file into itunes, just FE File Explorer.
 
Hey I noticed today (that on iphones 10 and later) you can personalize spatial audio for your ear shape:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213318
I'm using an iphone 8, so can't test, but curious if people find it makes a big difference. Might convince me to adopt a newer/larger model.

Any testers/users?
 
I want to say @PurpleMoustache was writing about this a couple of months back?
Yeah, everything feels a tad closer now. Pre-ear scan everything sounded about 4 feet away and now they sound about 1 foot away.

I find it harder to pinpoint the “channels” however, which makes it harder to tell if a mix is good or not.
 
I would hope for an improvement in things sounding behind me, vs. to the side. But I get that there is really no way to tell (for me) short of doing it myself.

I like the smaller formfactor of my iPhone 8, and that it has a real home button and no "notch", however.

Hmm, I wonder if I can fire up my wife's old iPhone 12 on WiFi, without a sim card, to test?
 
I would hope for an improvement in things sounding behind me, vs. to the side. But I get that there is really no way to tell (for me) short of doing it myself.

I like the smaller formfactor of my iPhone 8, and that it has a real home button and no "notch", however.

Hmm, I wonder if I can fire up my wife's old iPhone 12 on WiFi, without a sim card, to test?
I think it works on newer iPads too?
 
What I'm afraid of all this, is that if the big majority of people is going to listen this way, unless they improve a lot the binaural listening, the mixers will not try to do the good discrete mixes that we love in our discrete speakers home theater, and the Atmos mixes quality will decline.
 
Yeah, everything feels a tad closer now. Pre-ear scan everything sounded about 4 feet away and now they sound about 1 foot away.

I find it harder to pinpoint the “channels” however, which makes it harder to tell if a mix is good or not.
Anything sent to earphones must be in a matrixed format - and the matrix must be one that the ears can decode. Enter Bauer's dichophony experiments.
 
Thanks for the info in this thread.

I noticed a few of the sample files play in Google Drive and show as Multi-Channel.
Conversely, KMPlayer does not seem to support any multi-channel playback.

Next, I've been converting an old DTS 5.1 WAV to play through my Apple devices. I can convert to any type of multi-channel and have tried ALAC, AAC-AC3, AAC-DolbyDigital, etc. I can add them to Music.app on my Mac and they play back just fine, sounds wonderful. But the files will not sync to the cloud for me to play them on my iPhone.

Q: are there any multi-channel file formats that will sync to iCloud and be playable across all Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac)?

Thanks!
 
Thanks for the info in this thread.

I noticed a few of the sample files play in Google Drive and show as Multi-Channel.
Conversely, KMPlayer does not seem to support any multi-channel playback.

Next, I've been converting an old DTS 5.1 WAV to play through my Apple devices. I can convert to any type of multi-channel and have tried ALAC, AAC-AC3, AAC-DolbyDigital, etc. I can add them to Music.app on my Mac and they play back just fine, sounds wonderful. But the files will not sync to the cloud for me to play them on my iPhone.

Q: are there any multi-channel file formats that will sync to iCloud and be playable across all Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac)?

Thanks!
There are and aren’t.

Going through the music.app route will not get you results for multichannel music. That method uses “iCloud Music Library”, which is a renamed version of iTunes Match. It will search the Apple Music library for a match and add the album to your library that way, and if there is no match it will upload for cloud usage and convert to 256 AAC stereo as of time up upload. (Note: this is really useful for uploading Bandcamp only music to your Apple Music library. I download in ALAC so the file on my desktop is lossless, and the cloud version is converted from a lossless source)

You could put your multichannel FLACs and other files in the iCloud Drive however, and then transfer from iCloud Drive to assorted playback apps like VLC, etc. That would be the solution I can think of that utilizes iCloud
 
Back
Top