Apple Music Preview for Windows finally gets media keys and lyrics support

In early 2023, Apple released the first preview versions of Apple Music and Apple TV for Windows 11. In addition, the company offered a dedicated app for managing iOS-based devices. The initial release was rough — apps suffered from extreme amounts of bugs, instabilities, and missing or broken features. Fortunately, Apple has not abandoned its software; the most recent update includes several notable improvements.

Although there are no official changelogs, users discovered (via Macrumors) that Apple Music finally supports native media keys, allowing you to change tracks and play/pause with dedicated buttons on your keyboard. Another major change is lyrics support, albeit the karaoke feature is still missing. In addition, Apple fixed the skipping issue when playing high-res audio and improved adding songs to the queue.

The newest Apple Music Preview update for Windows is a great improvement for the app (media keys support alone makes the program worth trying), but it remains bug-ridden and unstable. Users continue reporting crashes, issues with changing output devices, sign-in issues (for some reason, you must log in twice before loading your library), and many more. You may want to resort to third-party apps like Cider while Apple is slowly patching its software for Windows. As for the other Apple apps, there is no information on what has changed.

You can download Apple Music Preview from the Microsoft Store using this link. Apple TV Preview is available here, and Apple Devices Preview here. Keep in mind that installing any of those apps will prevent iTunes from opening.