Dolby Atmos Comes to Apple Music for Windows
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Last year, Apple effectively retired iTunes for Windows in favor of standalone apps for music, videos, and device management. This mirrored what it had done for the Mac five years earlier in macOS Catalina.
While the new Apple Music and Apple TV apps brought over most of the important functionality from iTunes and roughly mirrored their macOS counterparts, some key features were still missing, such as the ability to import music from CDs and Dolby Atmos audio playback.
iTunes could still be used to import music from CDs, although Windows users had to resort to kludgy workarounds since the legacy app only works for Audiobooks and Podcasts once Apple Music has been installed (as of this writing, Apple Books and Apple Podcasts are not yet available for Windows).
On the other hand, the standalone Apple Music app was a nice upgrade for those who wanted to listen to Apple Music tracks in a higher-quality, lossless format. Although iTunes for Windows has always been able to play Apple Lossless (ALAC) files, it couldn’t stream these from the Apple Music service. Apple Music for Windows can do this, however it still lacked support for Apple’s Dolby Atmos spatial experience.
The good news is that Apple has recently addressed that. Starting with version 1.1284.20225 of Apple Music for Windows, PC owners can now enjoy the same immersive Dolby Atmos Spatial Audio experience as Mac users.
Sadly, the process isn’t quite as seamless as on macOS. Apple has published a new support article explaining how to set it up, noting, “You need the Dolby Access app to play supported songs in Dolby Atmos on your device.”
Apple doesn’t go into any more detail than that, but you’ll likely need to download Dolby Access from the Microsoft Store to provide the necessary codecs. They’re not included with Windows by default, although some higher-end PCs include Dolby Access pre-installed to support more premium speaker arrays.
While Apple says that Apple Music will provide a Spatial Audio experience “on stereo headphones and speakers or receivers compatible with Dolby Atmos,” the other catch that it fails to mention is that this will only be free of charge when using external speakers. That’s because Dolby Access requires a $15 in-app purchase if you want to use it with a set of headphones, although there is a free trial available.
Once you’ve installed the latest Apple Music for Windows update and Dolby Access, you can see albums available in Dolby Atmos by looking for the Dolby icon. New options in Apple Music settings let you choose whether or not to play supported songs in Dolby Atmos (found on the Playback tab) or download tracks in Dolby Atmos (which is somewhat oddly found on the General tab instead).
Once Dolby Atmos is enabled, the Dolby Atmos icon should appear beside the song title in the Now Playing window whenever you’re listening to a supported track on Atmos-compatible speakers or headphones. Clicking on this icon will provide a shortcut that will take you directly to the Playback Settings.
