Apple Music launched support for Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos back in June 2021. Since then, the catalog of songs available in these new formats has dramatically expanded. If you’ve struggled to keep up with the ever-expanding Apple Music catalog of Spatial Audio songs, here’s a new tool that could help you out…
Keeping track of Apple Music’s catalog of Spatial Audio songs
Music Library Tracker is a third-party app for iPhone and iPad that helps you monitor additions, deletions, and other changes to your music library. We first covered the app back in 2016 as a way to manage large music libraries. A new update to the app this week expands the app’s library monitoring to support Spatial Audio for the first time.
What this means is that Music Library Tracker will now monitor your library and alert you when a song in your library has been upgraded with Spatial Audio support. The app can also create a playlist containing just the songs that have been upgraded with Spatial Audio.
- Music Library Tracker can now detect if your tracks have a Spatial Audio version
- A new page lists all of these upgraded tracks in a timeline (tap a song to play it)
- Optional: The app can generate a Spatial Audio playlist within Apple Music that is updated automatically
- Optional: A daily notification detailing any new tracks that were upgraded in the previous day
- Spatial Audio scanning is an “opt-in” feature as it requires sending your music identifiers to a remote server. More information is available in my privacy policy and within the app. No personally identifiable information is ever sent.
Ben Dodson, the developer Music Library Tracker, explained his motivation for creating this feature:
Apple Music does not yet have a clear strategy for displaying Spatial Audio tracks. Whilst they have some playlists and collections that get updated weekly, the only way to tell which tracks in your own library are upgraded is to play them and see. This is obviously not ideal and not a great way to showcase what is a genuine leap in musical quality and the hundreds of thousands of tracks that have been upgraded. I created this feature as I was determined to find a way to see which tracks had been updated.
If you don’t want to use the full Music Library Tracker app, Dodson also has a Twitter account that tweets every time a track has been updated as well as a website that you can use to search for specific tracks.
Music Library Tracker is available on the App Store as a one-time purchase of $2.99 (25% off for the next week). It’s a very useful addition to any Apple Music user’s library, even beyond its support for Spatial Audio tracking.
