Apple Music is a solid streaming service with a wide catalog, arbitrary price hikes aside. If you don’t regularly peruse the app section of the Xbox store, you (like me) missed the fact that it’s now available on Xbox Series X and S, bringing it closer to parity with Spotify integration. While the app will look and behave how you’d expect, for the most part, there are a few quirks.
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Apple Music on Xbox Series X|S
- The interface is almost identical to a desktop and significantly snappier than running it through iTunes. Cutting decades of technical bloat from your streaming product makes it faster. Who knew?
- You are still restricted by what you can do on your current Apple Music plan. If it’s the base plan, you can only stream audio on one device at a time.
- Apple Music will constantly have music in the background after you hit play, even if there’s already audio in your game. You might have to dive into game menus for a sec to avoid some gnarly sound overlap.
- The playback controls are hard to get used to. True to Apple minimalism, there are no visible button mappings. Pressing right on the analog stick or d-pad within the app either fast forwards or advances to the next track, depending on context. Up reveals the track duration and current position. A and Y act as Play/Pause buttons, and B takes users to the previous menu layer.
Is this a perfect solution? Of course not. We live in a hellscape of proprietary corporate applications that can’t cooperate with each other. But we might as well take the small wins. If you were waiting for a chance to blast a Kelela single during your daily runs, go forth and conquer! It’s here, and for now, at least, it works.
