Change these Apple Music settings for a better listening experience

abdulmanannet77@gmail.comJanuary 3, 2026

0 1 4 minutes read

Change these Apple Music settings for a better listening experience

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If I had to cancel all but one of my subscriptions, I would keep Apple Music. It gives me access to almost all the music I could want and integrates seamlessly with the Apple ecosystem. It’s not perfect though, and some settings make things worse than they should be. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, you may want to change a few settings.

Make sure sound check is enabled

Sound Check is an Apple Music feature intended to normalize the volume of tracks you are listening to. Without the feature enabled, you might be listening to a very quiet classical piece, then suddenly have your ears torn off when a loud death metal song is the next track to play. Sound Check is intended to balance the volume between tracks to stop these sudden jumps.

There is a lot of debate online about this setting, and many people recommend that you turn it off. The debate seems to stem from a misconception that Sound Check compresses music, robbing it of some of its dynamic range and making the music appear flatter. That’s not what Sound Check does, however.

Sound Check analyzes each song to determine its volume. It then applies a gain adjustment to the track to align its volume with the target level. In fact, Apple Music simply lowers the volume for louder songs and raises it for quieter songs. The dynamic range should remain unchanged.

Sound check is enabled by default on newer devices, but if you have an older device it can still be disabled. You can enable the setting by going to Settings > Apps > Music, scrolling down, and turning on “Sound Check.”

Every Spotify subscriber should change these settings now

Improve your streaming with these simple tweaks.

Unless you love it, turn off Dolby Atmos

Traditionally, music is mixed in stereo, so different parts of the music, such as specific instruments or vocals, can be placed anywhere in the mix, from far left to far right. Dolby Atmos goes even further and can place sounds in a complete three-dimensional space. Vocals can sound like they’re coming from directly in front of you, for example, while drums can sound like they’re behind you or even above you.

This all sounds good in theory, but reality doesn’t always quite add up. First of all, to get the most out of Dolby Atmos, you should definitely listen on a multi-speaker system that supports it. If you’re listening on AirPods, for example, it’s unlikely the result will be as good.

Second, it all depends on the mix. A poorly mixed Dolby Atmos track won’t sound good, no matter how good your equipment is. Many Dolby Atmos tracks are mixed well, but there are many that are less than ideal. Unless you really like Dolby Atmos, you’re better off turning it off for a more consistent experience.

To turn off Dolby Atmos, go to Settings > Apps > Music and select “Dolby Atmos” in the “Audio” section. Choose “Off” if you do not want music to be played in Dolby Atmos.

Turn off lossless audio if listening with wireless headphones

The incredible rise of portable MP3 players like the iPod is entirely due to compression. The MP3 file format can compress audio files to a size suitable for a media player without losing much of the original audio quality of the music. However, MP3 and many other modern compression formats are lossy, meaning that some audio data is permanently lost during compression.

Lossless audio files are compressed without any loss of information. This means that when you play a lossless file, you get the exact sound of the original recording. Lossless compression seems like a no-brainer, but it has some drawbacks: Lossless compression results in significantly larger file sizes, which can eat into data allocations or storage space.

However, if you have the bandwidth and storage, you might be tempted to listen to all your music in lossless format. If you use wireless headphones, you won’t see any benefit. The Bluetooth connection used by wireless headphones such as AirPods does not have the bandwidth to transmit the large amount of data required for lossless audio. When you listen to a lossless file with your AirPods, the music is compressed for transmission, using a lossy compression format, so all the benefits of lossless are lost.

If you usually consume Apple Music through wireless headphones, there’s no reason to stream or download music in lossless format; it’s just using bandwidth or storage space unnecessarily. It is better to disable Lossless Audio.

Go to Settings > Apps > Music and scroll down to the “Audio” section. Tap “Audio Quality” and turn off “Lossless Audio”. Your music will now play or download in “High Quality” format, which is what you’ll hear in your AirPods anyway.

Turn off the Automix function

It’s always nice when a company forces a feature on you that you simply don’t want. In iOS 26, Apple Music gained a new Automix feature intended to transition between songs like a DJ, rather than letting one song finish before starting the next. It’s not something I would choose to enable, as I like to hear the end and beginning of songs I listen to, but Apple, in its wisdom, has it enabled by default.

This won’t work if you’re listening to an album that’s meant to play one song after another. But if you’re listening to a playlist, for example, expect to lose the last few seconds of each song and the first few seconds of the next as the tracks are messed up.

Fortunately, you can disable this option. Go to Settings > Apps > Music and tap “Song Transitions” in the “Audio” section. Turn off “Song Transitions” and this hideous feature will no longer haunt you.

Apple Music is my favorite subscription, and I find it well worth the price, especially with Family Sharing. I used to pay the equivalent of a month’s subscription to buy a single physical album, and now I have access to millions of songs whenever I want. However, you can definitely improve your listening experience by making a few changes to the settings. It’s just a shame that Apple makes you manually disable some of them in the first place.