Adding your own multi-channel audio to Music app

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2024-05-10 12:30:04

I’m really enjoying Dolby Atmos, “spatial audio”, or “surround sound” as we used to call it. There is so much music in this format on streaming platforms, both new albums and classic albums. I wanted to listen to Björk’s first four albums in “spatial audio”, but they don’t currently exist in that format on streaming platforms. But I was reminded about DVD-Audio versions of these from back in the day, and I could find most of mine, so I figured I’d have a go of converting them myself whilst I’m waiting for Dolby Atmos versions to hit streaming.

This blog post lists the three main steps needed to add your own multi-channel audio to Music.app (you might know it by its old name: iTunes) and have them be accessible across all of your devices thanks to Apple Music’s Cloud Library (you might know it by its old name: iCloud Music Library).

The albums I have were released on DVD and contain multi-channel audio in both DTS and Dolby Digital. We can take the VIDEO_TS folder, decrypt and convert to an MKV for easier handling in the following steps. MKV is just a container, so the audio is passed through untouched, so there’s no lossy conversion at this point. I used MakeMKV for this task.