After years of ready, Apple lastly added crossfading to the Music app two years in the past in iOS 17, and final week, it introduced it is going to take that to the following degree in iOS 26 with a brand new AI-powered AutoMix function.
Along with collaborating in Apple’s massive Liquid Glass redesign, the Music app will let you expertise much more pure music transitions through the use of time stretching and beat matching primarily based on AI evaluation.
This may let your music move seamlessly from one music into the following with none jarring transitions, going past easy crossfades that usually sound high-quality inside a single album however may be fairly jarring when listening to extra eclectic playlists of combined music.
Maybe the very best half is that this isn’t an “Apple Intelligence” function, which implies that any iPhone that may run iOS 26 can reap the benefits of it. Whereas Apple says that “AutoMix in Apple Music makes use of intelligence to seamlessly combine from one music to the following,” that differs from the “Apple Intelligence” model it explicitly makes use of when describing different options like Stay Translation.
Which means AutoMix ought to be out there on the iPhone 11 and newer fashions. It’s additionally coming to the Music app in iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26.
In iOS 26 et al., the standalone Crossfade setting has been changed with a brand new Music Transitions part that allows you to select whether or not to make use of AutoMix or stick to the usual Crossfade launched in iOS 17. Because the title suggests, AutoMix will maintain the transition length between songs, so that you’ll solely see a slider to set this in the event you go for the usual Crossfade setting, which affords the identical 1 to 12-second vary as iOS 18.
It took an astonishingly very long time for the iPhone Music app to get a crossfade function, contemplating that iTunes had this functionality from the primary day it was launched in 2003 — on each the Mac and the Home windows variations.
Even in these days, it was virtually solely a desktop function; music followers pleaded for Apple so as to add it to the iPod. It was added to the iPod nano in 2008, however oddly, it by no means got here to the iPod traditional or iPod contact. It took 15 years after its introduction on the iPod nano for even fundamental crossfading to return to the iPhone.
Whereas the iOS 17 implementation of crossfade was no higher than what iTunes had already supplied for twenty years, the brand new AutoMix function is a welcome enchancment, and it demonstrates how synthetic intelligence and machine studying options don’t need to be flashy to be helpful.
AutoMix is already enabled within the first developer betas of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and MacOS Tahoe, and it really works surprisingly properly, each in my very own listening expertise and in keeping with a number of early adopter experiences on social media praising it as being insanely good. One Redditor even shared a pattern recording of AutoMix in motion.
The catch is that it requires an Apple Music subscription and received’t work with music you’ve loaded instantly onto your iPhone.
That’s seemingly as a result of Apple has executed a lot of the AI heavy lifting on the again finish, simply because it did with AI-summarized App Retailer critiques in iOS 18.4. That’s seemingly why you received’t want a robust Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone to run it, and it’s additionally computationally economical. There’s no level in having thousands and thousands of iPhones reprocess the identical information to generate their very own AutoMix fades.
It’s not clear exactly how Apple has engineered this. It solely works when songs finish — not in the event you manually change to a brand new monitor — which means that Apple has added information initially and finish of every monitor as cues the Music app can learn to determine how you can modify tempo and quantity and transition into the following music on the excellent second.