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Apple Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Playback for Apple Music Subscribers Coming in June

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced that beginning in June, it will offer Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos to its Apple Music collection. The company also announced that it is bringing Lossless Audio to the entire Music catalog. Both features are being added to Apple Music at no additional cost to subscribers.

According to Apple’s press release:

“Apple Music is making its biggest advancement ever in sound quality,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats. “Listening to a song in Dolby Atmos is like magic. The music comes from all around you and sounds incredible. Now we are bringing this truly innovative and immersive experience to our listeners with music from their favorite artists like J Balvin, Gustavo Dudamel, Ariana Grande, Maroon 5, Kacey Musgraves, The Weeknd, and so many more. Subscribers will also be able to listen to their music in the highest audio quality with Lossless Audio. Apple Music as we know it is about to change forever.”

Spatial Audio will be the default playback option for AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, including AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, BeatsX, Beats Solo3 Wireless, Beats Studio3, Powerbeats3 Wireless, Beats Flex, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro. The feature will be available with other headphones, too, by going to Settings → Music → Audio and setting Dolby Atmos to ‘Always On.’ The playback feature is also supported by the latest models of iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple TVs. At launch, Apple says there will be thousands of tracks available with Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos support and that new ones will be added continuously. Music that supports the feature will be badged in the Music app so subscribers can find it more easily.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

In addition to Spatial Audio, Apple is offering lossless audio versions of the entire Apple Music catalog beginning in June, which Apple confirmed to The Verge, is an Apple Music exclusive. In other words, you won’t be able to purchase lossless versions of music from the iTunes Store. The 75 million songs in the catalog will use the ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) format and start with CD-quality 16-bit audio at 44.1 kHz and go up to 24 bit at 48 kHz. Apple will also offer Hi-Resolution Lossless up to 24 bit at 192 kHz, for which subscribers will need an external USB DAC. Lossless playback is also opt-in due to the large file sizes involved. After iOS, iPadOS 14.6, macOS 11.4, and tvOS 14.6 are released, you’ll go to Settings → Music → Audio Quality to pick between Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless. From the details released today, it is not clear whether AirPods and Beats wireless headphones will support Apple’s lossless formats.

As someone who owns good quality headphones, I’m glad to see Apple adding lossless options to Apple Music. Spatial Audio is intriguing too. It remains to be seen how widely adopted it will be, but I’ve enjoyed it with video via the TV app, so I’m eager to try it with Apple Music too.

Bartender 4: Take Control of Your Menu Bar [Sponsor]

Bartender 4 is the premier app for bringing order to your Mac’s menu bar. With more apps adding items to your menu bar than ever before, it doesn’t take long for it to become a disorganized jumble of everything from standalone apps to shortcuts to your Mac’s settings. With Bartender 4, you can take control of your menu bar, saving space, eliminating distractions, and creating a system that fits with the way you work.

Bartender 4 puts you in complete control of everything in the menu bar. You can reorder items, hide what you don’t need, and even set them to only appear when their status changes. With the latest update, Bartender added Quick Reveal. Simply hover the pointer over your menu bar, and hidden items appear instantly in the menu bar or, if you prefer, in the Bartender Bar, a bar that appears just below your menu bar. Also, with Quick Search, you can find and activate menu bar items instantly using nothing but your keyboard. It’s a compelling new way to access menu bar items that you’ll love.

The app is also highly customizable. You can adjust the spacing between items, include dedicated spacers to separate them, rearrange them, assign keyboard shortcuts to them, and assign triggers that reveal a menu bar item based on changes, scripts, and other conditions. Of course, Bartender also supports AppleScript.

This week only, MacStories readers who are first-time purchasers of Bartender 4 can get an exclusive 20% discount on this fantastic app by using the code MACSTORIES20OFF at checkout. So, download Bartender today, give it a try, and be sure to take advantage of this special 1-week offer to take back control of your menu bar.

Our thanks to Bartender 4 for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: A Darkroom Update and Pixelmator Pro Teaser, a New Flagship Apple Store in Rome, Snowman’s Upcoming App, and Thoughts on Shortcuts Notifications

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Sponsored by: Musens – The Beautiful Music Player

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Darkroom
    • A Morpho Converter giveaway
    • Recording Streaming Video with PlayOn and Channels
    • Don’t treat your RSS and Twitter like inboxes

AppStories

Unwind

Apple Prepares to Open Its Latest Flagship Store in Rome’s Historic Via del Corso Shopping District

Today, Apple took the wraps off its latest flagship store in the heart of Rome’s Via del Corso shopping district. The store is Apple’s first in Rome’s historic center, although the company has long had a presence in Rome and other parts of Italy, including another flagship store that was opened in Milan in 2018. The new Rome location isn’t open yet but will be soon.

As with many of Apple’s other flagship stores around the world, restoration of the historic location was spearheaded by the architectural firm Foster + Partners. The new store is located next to Piazza di San Silvestro, in the center of Rome within a short distance of landmarks like the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain.

Palazzo Marignoli, the building in which Apple’s new store is housed, has been carefully restored to its late 19th century glory. The palazzo once housed Caffè Aragno, a destination for writers, painters, and other creatives of Rome, a history that fits nicely with Apple’s vision of its flagship stores as destinations for creativity through technology.

In fact, you can see from the photo above, which was taken earlier today, that the window coverings say ‘Creativi dentro’ or ‘Creative inside.’ According to Apple, the message honors Rome’s rich cultural history embodied by Carrara marble, the predominant stone used in the store’s construction and the material that has been used by Roman architects and sculptors for centuries to create artistic masterpieces.

Six colors, Roman edition.

Six colors, Roman edition.

The same marble is incorporated into the Apple logo which weaves the company’s signature six colors into the veins of the stone. According to Apple, the logo symbolizes the fusion of Rome’s cultural history with Apple’s mission to provide tools that unlock everyone’s creativity with programs like those that will be led by Apple Creatives in the Via del Corso store when it opens to the public.

Alessandra Gatta contributed to this story with Italian-English translations.

Photo Editor and Organizer Darkroom Adds New Clarity Tool

Photo editing and management app Darkroom has been updated with a new Clarity slider that I’ve been testing on the iPhone and iPad for a couple of weeks now.

The new slider in the app’s editing panel is deceptively simple. Move the slider to the right to make the details of an image pop or to the left to smooth out the details. If you look carefully, though, you’ll notice that the increase in contrast isn’t uniform across a photo. You can turn the Clarity of a portrait down to smooth a person’s skin, for instance, without affecting their hair or eyes.

Source: Darkroom.

Source: Darkroom.

As Jasper Hauser explains on the Darkroom blog, the Clarity slider is logarithmic, meaning that the effect intensifies more quickly as you approach the endpoints. Picking a point in the middle of the slider’s range produces a subtler effect.

The effect works well with landscapes like the photo of skyscrapers along the Chicago River at the beginning of this story. You can see that increasing Clarity brings out the details in the windows of each building, and turning Clarity down softens areas like the water.

Clarity can achieve a wide range of effects like this shot where it is turned down, smoothing details

Clarity can achieve a wide range of effects like this shot where it is turned down, smoothing details

In contrast, turning up Clarity increases a photo's details dramatically.

In contrast, turning up Clarity increases a photo’s details dramatically.

As Hauser explains, Clarity works by building a detail map of an image and then adjusting the contrast of its regions using an algorithm called a Fast Local Laplacian Filter. There’s a lot of math happening under the hood that Hauser links to if you’re interested in learning more behind what the Darkroom team has managed to incorporate into a simple slider interaction that’s yet another excellent addition to this Apple Design Award-winning app. To learn more about Darkroom’s features, be sure to check out our past coverage and interview on AppStories with Darkroom co-founder Majd Taby.

Darkroom’s latest update is available on the App Store.

Pixelmator Pro Teases ML Crop Feature and Announces a 50% Off Sale

Source Pixelmator.

Source Pixelmator.

Some of the most impressive additions to Pixelmator Pro in recent updates have been the ones that rely on machine learning. From the auto enhancement feature added in 2018 to last year’s ML Color Match and ML Super Resolution, a wide variety of the app’s tools have harnessed machine learning to help photographers edit their images. Today, the Pixelmator team announced that their extending Pixelmator Pro’s reliance on machine learning to its cropping tool with ML Crop.

Source: Pixelmator.

Source: Pixelmator.

ML Crop uses machine learning to analyze the composition of a photo and suggest how you might like to crop it with the click of a single button. From the video in Pixelmator’s blog post, which is excerpted in the GIF above, the feature looks promising. ML Crop joins features that let you quickly set primary and secondary colors for an image and edit colors in a composition using drag and drop.

In addition to the sneak peek at ML Crop, Pixelmator announced today that the app is currently on sale for 50% off, which makes it a great time to jump in and give Pixelmator Pro if you haven’t yet.

AppStories, Episode 217 – Our 2021 macOS WWDC Wishes→

This week on AppStories, we begin our annual pre-WWDC wish list episodes with our 2021 wishes for macOS.

Sponsored by:

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  • Things – The award-winning to-do app.
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Snowman Announces New Creative Studio and Its First App, Pok Pok Playroom, A Digital Play Experience for Kids

Today, Snowman, the studio behind some of our favorite games on Apple platforms like Alto’s Adventure and Odyssey, Where Cards Fall, and Skate City, announced Pok Pok, a new creative studio that is launching an app on May 20th called Pok Pok Playroom.

Pok Pok Playroom is an app designed to encourage interactive play with a series of digital toys that spark curiosity and creativity in kids in a low-key, calming environment. The app’s digital playroom includes multiple brightly colored toys that prompt children to explore through independent play. Here’s how Snowman explains the app in its announcement:

Pok Pok’s first app is called Pok Pok Playroom. It’s a playroom filled with educational toys that spark creativity, imagination and learning through open-ended play. There is no right or wrong way to play, only lots of opportunities for experimentation and exploration. Pok Pok puts kids at the centre of the experience so they can follow their noses and learn at their own pace.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Pok Pok Playroom since I got a demo of an early version at WWDC in 2019 from Esther Huybreghts who, along with her husband Mathijs Demaeght, are the artist-duo and parents of two young children behind its development. I’ll have more to say about Pok Pok Playroom when it’s released on May 20th, but for now, check out the trailer, which does an excellent job of providing a feel for what the app is like:

Alongside the announcement of the trailer and app release date, Snowman announced that Pok Pok Playroom is part of a new creative studio called Pok Pok. The studio, which was incubated inside Snowman for the past few years, was co-founded by Huybreghts and Demaeght, along with Snowman’s Melissa Cash, Ryan Cash, and Jordan Rosenberg, and will continue to build Pok Pok Playroom and new content for it that will be released periodically.

For more information about the app and studio, visit playpokpok.com.

Musens: The Beautiful Music Player [Sponsor]

Musens is a beautiful, customizable music player for the iPhone that brings your music collection and Apple Music’s entire catalog to life with stunning animated artwork. The app has been built from the ground up to take advantage of Apple’s latest Swift UI frameworks and modern features. Whether you’re playing your favorite albums from your own library or trying something new on Apple Music, Musens lets you do so in a simple, elegant way.

Musen’s Home tab is the perfect place to start listening with its thoughtfully organized sections that feature playlists, albums, recently played material, top charts, recommendations, and more. It’s a deep well of music tuned to your tastes that makes picking something fast and simple because all of Apple Music’s extensive selection of music is available to browse and add to your own library.

Outstanding design is what sets Musens apart. Tap an album, and it opens with a delightful animation that reveals a vinyl record emerging from the artwork. Start playback, and the album art on the now playing screen rotates, providing a fun, dynamic turntable-like experience. The playback view is completely customizable, allowing you to enjoy static square art and three different background options too.

Musens also makes great use of intuitive gestures, making it effortless to build your playback queue. Of course, the app has dedicated tabs for easy access to your and Apple Music’s playlists, artists, songs, and albums as well as support for dark mode. Together, the attractive design and deep feature set make Musens an outstanding way to enjoy your favorite music.

Musens is the creation of Alec Attie, an iOS developer and the founder of Cybertiks, who won a WWDC scholarship in 2018 and currently works as a backend developer making apps for big companies like Miniso and the SEP, which is a governmental branch in Mexico.

Download Musens today, and start enjoying your music collection and the millions of songs available on Apple Music for just $3.99.

Our thanks to Musens for sponsoring MacStories this week.