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| Crossfade no more: it's time for something smoother | The Mysterious “Passthrough” Feature | Audio Enhancements at WWDC |
Crossfade no more: it's time for something smoother
Apple is preparing some significant updates to the Apple Music and QuickTime apps, and one of them is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. The update will apparently deliver much smoother audio transitions, and there's also a new and mysterious feature called “passthrough” that appears to be connected to Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio.
One of the new features is currently called smart song transitions, and it will reportedly be a better version of the crossfade option that fades one track into another. That works by reducing the volume of the track that's playing and fading up the volume of the next track, but with iOS 18, that's going to give you more control. You'll apparently be able to adjust the duration of the fade with transitions taking from one second to twelve seconds depending on how you set your app preferences. Longer transitions should mean less jarring changes between songs, but if you're quite happy with the current crossfade feature, that isn't going anywhere.
The Mysterious “Passthrough” Feature
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.
Audio Enhancements at WWDC
Although iOS 18 isn't due for public launch until September, we should get much more detail about the audio improvements in a few weeks during Apple's annual developer event, WWDC, scheduled for early June. That's when Apple tends to unveil the most interesting bits of its upcoming OS updates. Apple Music remains one of the best music streaming services out there, but if AppleInsider's report rings true, it could be about to get even better.
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