Did you know you can enjoy listening to Dolby Atmos tracks from Apple Music on headphones as if they were playing on a high-end 7.1.4 loudspeaker system in a perfectly tuned room? By default, the Apple Music app on a mobile phone or Mac computer plays the binaural version of Dolby Atmos tracks, which are specifically processed for Apple Spatial Audio. However, with minimal effort, you can configure the Apple Music app to decode the 7.1.4 multichannel stream of Atmos tracks and feed it into VIRTUOSO. This allows you to experience a binaurally translated version that more accurately represents the engineer’s original mix while offering flexible customisation for your headphone model and listening environment. It’s like turning your headphones into a world-class studio with 12 loudspeakers surrounding you. You will able to discover sounds in the song coming from speakers in front of, behind and above you much more clearly than before.
Follow the steps below to enjoy Dolby Atmos tracks from Apple Music with VIRTUOSO.
Prerequisite:
macOS version Monterey 12.5 or higher
Virtual audio driver (In this example, we will use BlackHole 16ch – free).
1. In the Music app on macOS, navigate to Settings > Playback and set Dolby Atmos to Automatic under Spatial Audio. This enables the decoding of up to a 7.1.4 multichannel stream if the playback device supports and is configured to output 12 audio channels. Note: ‘Always On’ outputs a 2-channel binaural version processed by Apple Spatial Audio
2. Open Audio MIDI Setup. Right-click BlackHole 16ch and select ‘Use This Device For Sound Output’. Then, right-click again and select ‘Configure Speakers’. From the Configuration dropdown menu, select 7.1.4. Ensure that channel numbers are assigned to all the speakers (1 to 12, from top to bottom of the speaker list)
3. (Optional) BlackHole does not provide clock syncing with other devices, which may lead to occasional glitches, especially when performing CPU-intensive tasks simultaneously. To avoid this issue, you can create an Aggregate Device combining BlackHole 16ch and your audio interface in Audio MIDI Setup, set your audio interface as the Clock Source, and enable Drift Correction for BlackHole 16ch. Note: the output device should remain BlackHole 16ch in Audio MIDI Setup, while the input device in VIRTUOSO should be the Aggregate Device
4. In the VIRTUOSO standalone app, navigate to Options > Audio Settings and set the Aggregate Device as Input and your audio interface as Output. That’s it! You can now stream Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 from Apple Music into VIRTUOSO and experience a true binaural translation of how the Atmos mix sounds over loudspeakers in one of the perfectly tuned rooms provided as presets, or in your own room, which VIRTUOSO can closely simulate.
If you’re wondering why it’s worth going through these extra steps to use VIRTUOSO for binaural audio instead of simply using the default binaural stream from Apple Music, this article explains the reason.
To further enhance the immersive binaural audio experience, VIRTUOSO offers a head tracking feature compatible with various head trackers. We recently partnered with Audeze to integrate the head tracking capability of the Maxwell headset. Click here to learn how to set it up.
p.s. If you are a Windows PC user, you can route computer audio into VIRTUOSO standalone using virtual audio drivers such as VB Audio Matrix and Dante Via. Unfortunately, the Apple Music app for Windows does not support Dolby Atmos. However, it will still provide an excellent experience for listening to stereo music or watching films in binaural audio with VIRTUOSO, offering a more natural and comfortable listening experience similar to loudspeaker listening, compared to headphones.