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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing wrong with spatial audio, it's beautiful. There's something terribly wrong with Apple trying to force audio that wasn't meant to be spatial into being spatial.

If the original artist intended the audio to be spatial, it has enormous potential and I'm pretty much sure there will be more and more artists doing that, creating a new category. But taking our good ol' perfectly-sounding stereo songs and turning them into spatial just for the sake of marketing, not good.

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Wait, are artists being forced to do this? Or are you referring to old, dead artists whose music is being converted? If the latter, then it is hard to say they wouldn’t have used spatial Gad the technology existed.

> “Just for the sake of marketing”

This seems to conflict with the first sentence where you admit it’s beautiful.

In the first sentence I meant spatial audio is good, and what I was referring to was when it was meant to be spatial from beginning, intended by the artists. "Just for the sake of marketing" obviously refers to Apple taking original artist's stereo-intended song and turning it into spatial, which might not necessarily what the artist wants audience to hear under their name.

It's a bit of an insult to the original artist, in my view. When I create something, it's an expression of my personality, and I the choices I make reflect my aesthetic. If you take it and remix it, that's fine, but don't put my name on it, it's "Song X (Apple Atmos Remix)" now.

Presumably all the rights holders have agreed to the “remix” without this demand. Surely if you create your own music you can tell Apple to go to hell and keep it in the version you created. Worst case they drop all non-Atmos files in the future and you become de-platformed. Doubtful that will happen given the size of their library.

Yes, but I have a suspicion the rights holder in this case is the label and not the composer/performer.

That’s almost certainly the case, and something the composer/performer signed up for as part of the deal. So what’s the conflict with someone who owns rights to some thing allowing someone else to do things with that thing?

It just feels like a massive stretch to act like these poor performers are being taken advantage of with Atmos remixing.

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