Spatial audio 'passthrough' feature may be coming in iOS 18

Apple News & Gear
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Apple is also working on a new feature called “Passthrough” for ‌Apple Music‌ and QuickTime Player, but there is no information on what this feature is. The site suggests that it is related to Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. :thinking:

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Oh this one is very interesting…

As reported on Tech Radar today…

> The other feature that’s piquing everyone’s curiosity is called “passthrough”, which will only be available on “supported hardware”. We don’t yet know what that hardware will be, and we don’t really know what passthrough will do. But AppleInsider reckons that it’s something to do with Spatial Audio, and it’ll be in both Apple Music and QuickTime. Apple is also working on audio for “spatial gaming”, but that appears to be a longer term project rather than anything we’ll see or hear imminently.

Could we finally get Atmos Pass through on Apple TV with TVOS18? Fingers are firmly crossed!

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Perhaps this is for lossless Atmos on Apple Music? If so, let’s hope developers will get access to it (which hopefully is full bitstreaming) too. :crossed_fingers:

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What I know about Apple is they value their walls, they will never do anything that puts their ecosystem at risk, NEVER!!!

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So… WWDC is come and gone… Those Apple Ecosystem walls are higher than ever :unamused:

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Maybe they are referring to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ5pdgA5J38

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So if I’m not wrong they differentiate a lot from what Infuse has previously been doing.

Previously what they having been doing, is just to pass thru the Dolby Atmos EC3 audio to the audio output and let whatever hardware to do the decoding.

With what RealityKit Spatial Audio can do is that, The OS is handling the spatial rendering to device, but providing every app developer (incl Infuse) the ability to control the sound in spatial level.

So either Infuse has to implement their own Dolby Atmos decoder to make it work, assuming there is no licensing issue with dolby, and Apple rendering can actually handle multichannel hi-res audio. then yes that’s possible

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Some developments in this area:

Hopefully tvOS next? One can dream.

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Feel free to test these lossless audio mp4 in QuickTime/Safari! :slightly_smiling_face:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ssBOSqaO9teCgvZN-rmIkIoISJif6SY1?usp=sharing
They are available on demolandia.net.
I just remuxed them to be Apple QuickTime compatible.