Apple's AutoMix in macOS 26 isn't a house DJ, but is a good FM radio simulator

Apple's AutoMix feature will debut in macOS 26 and iOS 26 in the fall. It's pretty good for casual listening, but won't replace good DJ software or a human with skill.

I'm not young. Most regular AppleInsider users know that I was in the Navy for a decade, but I didn't join when I was 18.

For a few years, in a sequence of events I won't delve into here involving college and commercial radio, I improbably got dragged into disk jockeying in clubs and bars for extra cash. My main gig was a Champions sports bar in Western Massachusetts, that is now long-gone and the site of a casino.

Anyway, back in the day, when I was spinning, it was 90% vinyl. There was a skill set associated with cueing up a record, and manually backing up the platter a bit, so the record player could get up to speed when the song started, so it wasn't distorted because the record or single was a few rotations per minute too slow.

That was DJ 101. DJ 201 was and probably still is beat-to-beat mixing, with the origin of it said to be in the sixties. The originator depends on who you listen to, with tales varying between an assortment of DJs, or Reggae music a whole responsible for founding the practice.

Anyway, much later, in the days of "Can't Touch This," "Ice Ice Baby," and "Rico Suave" I got some skill in changing the beat slightly for a good cross-fade, so to not disrupt the rhythm of the dance floor.

DJ software exists. I've fiddled with some over the years, but there's no reason to use it for household mixing. It's the proverbial sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.

So, to my surprise and delight, Apple revealed its AutoMix feature for Apple Music. Apple said this was effectively beat-to-beat mixing. In short, automatic execution of modern DJ software features.

I had to try it on my Mac. If you don't read any further, it's pretty good — but it isn't perfect.

Using AutoMix on macOS 26

Every year, I install the betas on macOS first. This year, AutoMix was the first thing I tried after a glance at Liquid Glass.

There's a simple pull-down menu to turn the feature on. It's on or it's off. No other granularity — which I will talk about more shortly.

macOS 26 AutoMix feature pull-down menu

With the feature on, I plowed through my normal playlists. I've got a few '80s favorites, dance track playlists, classic rock, and so forth, what you'd expect from a man in his mid-fifties with a wide musical taste.

Instead of Apple Music fading one song out, then silence, then the new track starts, the feature gives you more of a radio edit. You can hear the initial beats of the next song overlaid over the running track. This is what FM sounds like, almost always, assuming that the DJ or software package that runs the station is any good.

This is, of course, if there isn't more than 10 seconds of silence at the end of the song. The feature falls down on this, and just mixes silence in. This effectively gives you the same thing that you had before, albeit with a shorter period of silence.

You can fix this manually in metadata with your own files downloaded to your Mac, but it's time consuming and aggravating. It's not clear if Apple will do anything about this, but we'll see.

Electronica, Trance, and House tracks worked the best. Classic Rock lead-outs, meaning the fade at the end of a track, were just generally too long to make this work well, with Prog-rock like Yes and Asia being the worst offenders. Rock as a whole is harder to beat-to-beat mix, as it has always been thus.

Classical works, sort of. As with other genres, it's mostly dependent on the length of silence at the end of a track. Even if it's a "good" mix, it sounds weird, though, especially if there's a great deal of changing the beats per minute of the two tracks. I don't recommend it.

There's also a weird stuttering bug when you scrub through a song. I've seen up to three repeated beats after a scrub, but it cleans up quickly.

The feature also doesn't work with AirPlay speakers at all because of how the OSes hand off music to devices, and Apple is clear about that. It's fine on dumber Bluetooth speakers, though, because they're simple audio streams.

It's not clear if this will change. I'm not expecting it to, given the UI dialog associated with the pull-down menu.

Not quite getting the party started

For casual playback, or for a simple get-together, the feature works well enough now. We'd like a little more Apple Intelligence-powered smarts to the feature, with it auto-detecting the silence and lead-out of the trailing track versus the lead-in to the next one.

These features mostly already exist in modern DJ software. AutoMix won't replace them, and I don't think that Apple has that in mind.

Yet, at least. For now, though, I can be 20 again, and in a playlist remake that MTV Hits to Go CD that I'd put on when I needed to take a break.