So I tend to listen to music with dolby atmos (spatial audio) a lot. For a long time I had this issue where during song transitions, the next song after the current one would start, cut out right after the initial transient for half-a-second, then come right back, interrupting the whole gapless flow of certain songs. However, this only happens with atmos and lossless. If I stream said songs in 256kbps aac (high quality), without the dolby atmos version downloaded, it goes from 1 song to the next with no issues. Until recently I thought it was an issue in apple music itself. However, recently I happened to play an album while VoiceOver was off, and to my surprise, the bug disappeared. Thing is, you’ll have to open the app fresh after you turn VO off for the bug to go away. But if you turn VO on it’ll start bugging again. Am I the only 1 or is this universal? MacOS has fixed this recently, but from iOS 17 all the way to 18.6.2 this still happens with all the phones I tested it with.
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Same Experience
Hi,
Yes I've been having the same experience, although I didn't know that it may be due to the selected audio quality. It sort of defeats the object of seamless playback, but this issue has been there since the crossfade feature was introduced.
I did actually send a feedback report to apple support
I sent Apple’s accessibility team an email about it with a whole video demonstrating the bug. They said they sent the info to the appropriate team for investigation, but haven’t heard from them ever since. Funny enough, if you just download what ever song in high quality, no dolby atmos, it’s fine. But if you download the atmos version, but happen to listen with atmos off, even with regular aac you’ll get that bug in that case. It’d be great if anyone reading this would make noise to apple about it, or for any beta testers to leave a report in the feedback app. Surprised Apple let this one slip.
Same on Apple TV
Seeing this thread got me thinking. I had been noticing a songs missing the first half second or so when playing back an atmos playlist on my apple TV to my receiver. I thought it was just the receiver having an issue with changing from stereo to atmos, or even atmos to atmos, as if it was resetting the codec. But I just gave it a try with and without VoiceOver running on the Apple TV, and when it's not running, there's no pause or gap or missing bars from the beginning of the next song. So I guess this carries over.
I've seen places where bitstream audio isn't possible when a screen reader is running, making things like high bit rate audio a non-option, like on my bluray player, when I enable the screen reader feedback for the controls and menus. It disables bitstream audio options, and I'm restricted to PCM. In a way I understand the reason for this, but don't understand why they aren't able to find a way to work around it.
Everyone has a similar problem
I'm not saying there isn't a VO-specific bug as well, but do some Googling, and there's always been the cut-out when playing an album with lossless audio quality on IOS, not just for VO users. quality levels are set independently in the settings app for downloads versus streaming. If it's cropped up now on AppleTV, that's something new. Track playlists (not albums with sequential tracks) don't have the problem. It seems like a buffering issue--at least, the non-VoiceOver-specific variant of the bug.