Apple is expanding the audio mix controls from the built-in Photos app to third-party apps on the iPhone, iPad and Mac this fall.
Apple announced earlier this month that iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26 bring the Audio Mix features to third-party apps that choose to implement them using a new API. As a result, you’ll be able to use advanced audio mixing in compatible apps beyond the built-in Camera and Photos apps.
This computational audio feature improves sound quality dramatically by automatically reducing background noise and boosting the volume of people speaking after the video has been recorded.
iOS 26 brings the Audio Mix features to third-party apps
According to a WWDC25 session video discussing how developers can enhance their apps’ audio recording capabilities, third-party iPhone, iPad and Mac apps can offer Audio Mix controls starting with iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26.
“Your apps can use the new API for the Audio Mix effect, which allows people to easily adjust the balance of foreground and background sounds,” Apple notes. Third-party apps can use the existing audio mixing modes from the Photos app—called Cinematic, Studio and In-Frame—that provide control of the balance between foreground sounds like speech and background ambient noise.
In addition, six new mixing styles are available exclusively in third-party apps via the new API. According to Apple, these provide the extracted speech by itself, as a mono, foreground stem or only the ambience background stem.
Studio-quality audio recording
I’m especially excited about these improvements in the context of studio-quality audio recording available on the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2. Coming as part of the AirPods changes available with iOS 26, this feature takes advantage of computational audio techniques that boost tonal balance and timbre to authentically represent the texture of a person’s speaking voice.
You’ll need to install iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26 on your iPhone, iPad and Mac when Apple releases the updates publicly this fall, and developers will also need to update their third-party camera and media editing apps to implement these awesome audio mixing features for you to enjoy them.
What is Audio Mix and how does it work?
Introduced in 2024, Audio Mix is exclusive to the iPhone 16 lineup and the iPhone 16e. It works in the built-in Camera app and shows up in the Photos editing interface automatically provided a video was recorded on a compatible iPhone.
For the audio mix to work, however, you must turn on spatial audio capture in Settings > Camera > Record Sound. Using machine learning, this feature can boost the audio to sound like a studio recording and more.
The available options include:
- Standard: Play the original audio you recorded.
- In-Frame: Reduce sounds and voices from sources not visible in the video frame.
- Studio: Reduce background sounds and reverb to make it sound more like you’re recording in a professional studio.
- Cinematic: Put all the voices onto a front-facing track and leave environmental noises in surround, like the audio in movies.
Spatial audio in audio-only apps
On iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26, spatial audio can be selected in audio-only apps. For example, for Voice Memos this can be turned on in Settings > Apps > Voice Memos > Recording Mode. The operating systems use the QuickTime audio format QTA to save spatial audio. The format allows for multiple audio tracks with alternate track groups, just like how spatial audio files are composed.
Don’t conflate the Audio Mix feature with AutoMix, which is a new feature in iOS 26’s Music app that uses AI for DJ-like transitions from one song to the next, using techniques like time stretching and beat matching.