Sorry - completely disagree - "music inherentley is just something you put on in the background". Griff's new song Black Hole and Billie's new song are just a couple of examples of songs that I listen to - every word and every note.
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Apple Music Launching Spatial Audio With Dolby Atmos and Lossless Audio in June at No Extra Cost
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As someone that enjoys music and recently left Android this is at the top of my disappointments with my iPhone experience. I was a Tidal Hi-Fi subscriber but whether listening wired via Apple’s $9 dongle or wireless to my BTR-5 or Sony XM4’s…it all sounds anemic compared to my Android as a source. I’m hoping this will improve things, even if it requires a new dongle. But yes, I’m still hoping for an improvement on AAC. I’m guessing it will happen…in due time.
I wonder if you will be able to play back the audio through a Home Theater system and have it play as Atmos. Maybe using the Apple TV?
Why do you say that? Right now I'm listing to a HD version of Kind of Blue on my AirPods Max.
Isnt iTunes Match just rolled into Music as a feature? I mean, all matched songs are available offline just like they were on itunes
I'm assuming macos 11.4 developer beta will be our first chance to see it in action? I'm in the same boat, wanna try asap
Music enjoyment is highly personal. I'm glad streaming works for you, and I understand it is possible to download streaming music. Apple Music meets your needs. It doesn’t meet mine. It doesn’t make either of our use cases more or less valid than the other. I’m just a little salty that Apple doesn’t seem to recognize that my use case exists, even though I’m a bit of an outlier. Remember “Think Different”? Apparently, Apple doesn’t.
I have an extensive library (mostly of ripped CDs), and I don't spend $99/year on downloads OR streaming because I already have a collection of music with which to occupy my listening time. I would like to be able to access or even purchase lossless versions of the portion of my collection that does come from the iTunes ecosystem so my entire library is at a consistent level of quality. I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept for others to grasp.
I’m right there with you. This is a disappointing announcement. I keep a spare android phone around to stream music using LDAC and AptxHD.
If Apple wants to become a Hi-Res streaming service, it will need to make a few adjustments.
1. Bring back Direct Mode kernel extension that was dropped around catalina if I remember correctly. This is a much shorter audio signal path that benefits higher quality streaming.
2. Allow for a Qobuz/Tidal type of API to let third party audiophile music players to hook up to Apple Music. I'm talking about apps like Audirvana or Roon, which upsamples tracks to DSD and outputs to USB DACs.
3.Adjust playback bitrate to target DAC. This is especially important for CarPlay, where most DACs are running at 24bit/48khz by default. The player should default to multiples of 48khz in that case (88khz/192khz and not 96khz).
4. Allow me to specify tracks that I want to force from my personal library. I still have a few tracks that AM mistakenly replaces with their own catalog and it's just wrong. Give me a checkbox to "force upload"!
1. Bring back Direct Mode kernel extension that was dropped around catalina if I remember correctly. This is a much shorter audio signal path that benefits higher quality streaming.
2. Allow for a Qobuz/Tidal type of API to let third party audiophile music players to hook up to Apple Music. I'm talking about apps like Audirvana or Roon, which upsamples tracks to DSD and outputs to USB DACs.
3.Adjust playback bitrate to target DAC. This is especially important for CarPlay, where most DACs are running at 24bit/48khz by default. The player should default to multiples of 48khz in that case (88khz/192khz and not 96khz).
4. Allow me to specify tracks that I want to force from my personal library. I still have a few tracks that AM mistakenly replaces with their own catalog and it's just wrong. Give me a checkbox to "force upload"!
You can download it locally. Just because it's a streaming service doesn't mean you can't preload your device for offline listening. It's just that the music disappears if you let your subscription lapse.
AirPods Gen 2 will still support Dolby Atmos on Apple Music! Wild, but very cool.
I have both Gen 2 and AirPods Pro, but I can't use the Pro since they keep falling out of my ears. Great that both will now be supported.
Variety is great. But you have vastly different tastes to many of your fellow country men and women. Your collection is likely absent of Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastien, Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub, all bands from Scotland with recent new releases.
While that is true, many subscribers to Apple Music also have wired setups for their music. I currently also subscribe to Tidal for lossless music and Apples addition of lossless music means I can now dump Tidal and maintain only one library which is a major convenience. I'm also assuming this will attract more users to Apple Music who can now listen to lossless and high res music on their systems.
One thing I was never able to verify with Apple's use of Bluetooth AAC is whether they synchronise the bitrate of the playback with the bitrate of the Bluetooth transmission?
If I play a song on Apple Music on my iPhone 12 Pro wirelessly using my Apple AirPods Pro or AirPods Max. Will it play using 256 kbps without any kind of re-encoding or transcoding taking place? What if I move away from my phone making the Bluetooth connection worse will it then suddenly start transcoding as a result of the connection not being able to keep any stable 256 kbps connection going?
Unless Apple is somehow capable of enforcing Bluetooth AAC transmission to not do any kind of transcoding, aka it preserves the 256 kbps stream for Apple Music bit-perfect between the iPhone/iPad/Mac having access to Apple Lossless will be a benefit regardless of any changes to the Bluetooth transmission.
I would think Apple has to do Bluetooth AAC transcoding for Bluetooth AAC transmission to work. Meaning they take a really great 256 kbps AAC and transcodes it between the source and the destination. Transcoding from a good 256 kbps AAC source using Bluetooth AAC will most likely be able to keep some kind of near bit-perfect transmission going most of the time but I doubt it's able to do it all of the time.
Having 16-bit, 44.1kHz Apple Lossless created from the same great Apple Digital Masters will make sure that we won't need to have any kind of transcoding or re-encoding of an already lossy source taking place. So instead of the worst-case scenario where Bluetooth AAC needs to take its already lossy AAC 256 kbps source and start messing with it, you will now have a scenario with a source that is lossless that needs to mess it. Still not perfect or ideal, but much better. And considering how pretty much every double-blind test shows how even the most extreme audiophiles have a really hard telling a ~200 kbps VBR AAC file apart from a fully lossless file from the same source the Bluetooth AAC transcoding needs to do a really bad job for it to manage to mess up the transcoding in such a way that it impacts the audio quality.
This will only make a difference if Apple doesn't have something in place that already makes sure that Apple Music playback with its 256 kbps AAC source somehow is going bit-perfect from the devices using Bluetooth AAC to their headphones. If they have something in place that make sure this is already happening then using Apple Lossless for playback using Bluetooth AAC will just be wasting bandwidth for no reason.
They don't really mention how the Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos will work either. Bluetooth AAC is limited in its capabilities and bandwidth. How will these tracks work? Dolby Atmos is binaural audio. So it doesn't really feature any specific amounts of audio channels. But one has to think that having a song that would normally be 256 kbps stereo (2.0) AAC that suddenly becomes available in a Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos version would no longer fit the same 256 kbps bitrate as it will obviously have to contain additional binaural audio data? How will that work with Bluetooth AAC? Will Dolby Atmos playback happen at a lower bitrate? I don't think it will matter all that much, going down to even 128 kbps AAC and it will still feel pretty much transparent with 16-bit, 44.1kHz lossless for the majority of users. I would just love to have some technical details on what is going on here.
It would make it much easier to decide what settings will be best suited for each of my devices. I'm not connecting any wired headphones to my iPhone or iPad anymore. So I would really love to know the technical details as there is no point in activating settings that will just increase bandwidth without having any possibility of increasing the quality. On my Mac mini, I will obviously activate Hi-Res Apple Lossless as I have my Hegel HD12 DAC, connected to my Schiit Magnius amplifier running my Sennheiser HD 800S headphones running with fully balanced cables through the entire stack. I don't expect me to be able to tell any difference between 16-bit, 44.1kHz 256 kbps AAC and 24-bit, 192kHz, 1411 kbps Apple Lossless but there is no reason for me to not opt for it when it doesn't cost me anything extra as my equipment, in theory, might sound better with these options enabled.
On my iPhone and iPad, it will only make sense if the technical details make sense for it to be enabled. If Apple is already ensuring bit-perfect 256 kbps AAC transmission using Bluetooth AAC and nothing will change on the Bluetooth side of things from Apple to make it capable of taking any benefit from either Apple Lossless or Hi-Res then I would simply be wasting bandwidth for no reason by enabling it on my iPhone and iPad.
All the information seems to point to Apple using the very same Apple Digital Masters which is supposed to be 24-bit, 192kHz for creating all these new versions. So everything from the Hi-Res 24-bit, 192kHz Apple Lossless to the regular 16-bit, 44.1kHz Apple Lossless and the already existing 16-bit, 44.1kHz AAC 256 kbps and 128 kbps lossy versions are created using the same source masters. I highly doubt any of us will be able to tell any of these versions apart in a double-blind test. It's not like human ears need any higher resolution compared to 16-bit, 44.1kHz. It's not like we are in the need of added dynamic range for audio playback or anything.
https://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/the-24bit-delusion/ is a good read on the topic.
Obviously, Apple needs different masters for the Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos versions. So they will most likely sound different compared to their regular versions. But as binaural audio is so different compared to regular stereo and surround playback these will sound and feel very different compared to their regular versions regardless of their masters. It will be very interesting to see what binaural audio has to offer for music playback. Having music in surround was all the hype back in the day but it died rather quickly and didn't really offer anything that improved upon the music listening experience. Heck, a lot of music is more or less mono and not stereo at all. If you listen to the most popular songs that are being released in the last couple of years barely any of them integrates any kind of stereo mixing in their soundtracks. You could simply take everything that is being played on the left channel and duplicate it to the right channel and you will have 99% the same exact experience listening to it. That was the whole problem with music utilising surround as it didn't really make much sense splitting soundtracks into 5-9 channels. Or at least no artist managed to think of any clever way of recording music where they could really utilise additional channels to their benefit. Now we have to see if artists are capable of utilising binaural for anything useful and interesting.
If I play a song on Apple Music on my iPhone 12 Pro wirelessly using my Apple AirPods Pro or AirPods Max. Will it play using 256 kbps without any kind of re-encoding or transcoding taking place? What if I move away from my phone making the Bluetooth connection worse will it then suddenly start transcoding as a result of the connection not being able to keep any stable 256 kbps connection going?
Unless Apple is somehow capable of enforcing Bluetooth AAC transmission to not do any kind of transcoding, aka it preserves the 256 kbps stream for Apple Music bit-perfect between the iPhone/iPad/Mac having access to Apple Lossless will be a benefit regardless of any changes to the Bluetooth transmission.
I would think Apple has to do Bluetooth AAC transcoding for Bluetooth AAC transmission to work. Meaning they take a really great 256 kbps AAC and transcodes it between the source and the destination. Transcoding from a good 256 kbps AAC source using Bluetooth AAC will most likely be able to keep some kind of near bit-perfect transmission going most of the time but I doubt it's able to do it all of the time.
Having 16-bit, 44.1kHz Apple Lossless created from the same great Apple Digital Masters will make sure that we won't need to have any kind of transcoding or re-encoding of an already lossy source taking place. So instead of the worst-case scenario where Bluetooth AAC needs to take its already lossy AAC 256 kbps source and start messing with it, you will now have a scenario with a source that is lossless that needs to mess it. Still not perfect or ideal, but much better. And considering how pretty much every double-blind test shows how even the most extreme audiophiles have a really hard telling a ~200 kbps VBR AAC file apart from a fully lossless file from the same source the Bluetooth AAC transcoding needs to do a really bad job for it to manage to mess up the transcoding in such a way that it impacts the audio quality.
This will only make a difference if Apple doesn't have something in place that already makes sure that Apple Music playback with its 256 kbps AAC source somehow is going bit-perfect from the devices using Bluetooth AAC to their headphones. If they have something in place that make sure this is already happening then using Apple Lossless for playback using Bluetooth AAC will just be wasting bandwidth for no reason.
They don't really mention how the Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos will work either. Bluetooth AAC is limited in its capabilities and bandwidth. How will these tracks work? Dolby Atmos is binaural audio. So it doesn't really feature any specific amounts of audio channels. But one has to think that having a song that would normally be 256 kbps stereo (2.0) AAC that suddenly becomes available in a Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos version would no longer fit the same 256 kbps bitrate as it will obviously have to contain additional binaural audio data? How will that work with Bluetooth AAC? Will Dolby Atmos playback happen at a lower bitrate? I don't think it will matter all that much, going down to even 128 kbps AAC and it will still feel pretty much transparent with 16-bit, 44.1kHz lossless for the majority of users. I would just love to have some technical details on what is going on here.
It would make it much easier to decide what settings will be best suited for each of my devices. I'm not connecting any wired headphones to my iPhone or iPad anymore. So I would really love to know the technical details as there is no point in activating settings that will just increase bandwidth without having any possibility of increasing the quality. On my Mac mini, I will obviously activate Hi-Res Apple Lossless as I have my Hegel HD12 DAC, connected to my Schiit Magnius amplifier running my Sennheiser HD 800S headphones running with fully balanced cables through the entire stack. I don't expect me to be able to tell any difference between 16-bit, 44.1kHz 256 kbps AAC and 24-bit, 192kHz, 1411 kbps Apple Lossless but there is no reason for me to not opt for it when it doesn't cost me anything extra as my equipment, in theory, might sound better with these options enabled.
On my iPhone and iPad, it will only make sense if the technical details make sense for it to be enabled. If Apple is already ensuring bit-perfect 256 kbps AAC transmission using Bluetooth AAC and nothing will change on the Bluetooth side of things from Apple to make it capable of taking any benefit from either Apple Lossless or Hi-Res then I would simply be wasting bandwidth for no reason by enabling it on my iPhone and iPad.
All the information seems to point to Apple using the very same Apple Digital Masters which is supposed to be 24-bit, 192kHz for creating all these new versions. So everything from the Hi-Res 24-bit, 192kHz Apple Lossless to the regular 16-bit, 44.1kHz Apple Lossless and the already existing 16-bit, 44.1kHz AAC 256 kbps and 128 kbps lossy versions are created using the same source masters. I highly doubt any of us will be able to tell any of these versions apart in a double-blind test. It's not like human ears need any higher resolution compared to 16-bit, 44.1kHz. It's not like we are in the need of added dynamic range for audio playback or anything.
https://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/the-24bit-delusion/ is a good read on the topic.
Obviously, Apple needs different masters for the Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos versions. So they will most likely sound different compared to their regular versions. But as binaural audio is so different compared to regular stereo and surround playback these will sound and feel very different compared to their regular versions regardless of their masters. It will be very interesting to see what binaural audio has to offer for music playback. Having music in surround was all the hype back in the day but it died rather quickly and didn't really offer anything that improved upon the music listening experience. Heck, a lot of music is more or less mono and not stereo at all. If you listen to the most popular songs that are being released in the last couple of years barely any of them integrates any kind of stereo mixing in their soundtracks. You could simply take everything that is being played on the left channel and duplicate it to the right channel and you will have 99% the same exact experience listening to it. That was the whole problem with music utilising surround as it didn't really make much sense splitting soundtracks into 5-9 channels. Or at least no artist managed to think of any clever way of recording music where they could really utilise additional channels to their benefit. Now we have to see if artists are capable of utilising binaural for anything useful and interesting.
Until today I have no idea of their existence and by tomorrow I'll forget they existed and just shove on my usual playlist so I know exactly how long it is until lunch time.
Why are people jumping the gun and assuming Apple won’t sell lossless files?
It would be pretty silly to offer 24-bit/192 kHz files for streaming, but only sell compressed 256 kbps files for sale.
Ok, I know what I’m about to say sucks and I am on your side that they should let you upgrade, but honestly what is one thing you’ve ever bought and then been able to get a better version free or at a lower cost later on? Did you use cassette tapes before and get upgraded to cds for free or a reduced fee? No, no one did.
Plus it’s not like it’s set in stone that you’ll never be able to upgrade once they allow it.
I agree about Audirvana. Would like it to support Apple music. But seeing how slow Audirvana is with Spotify HD and Amazon HD, who knows when it will happen.
Apple Music doesn‘t have all songs that exist on iTunes included in their offering + it‘s a changing catalogue. I know a few songs / albums that aren‘t available (never were or got removed a while ago) or are on the service „on and off“. You can easily check that yourself by creating a smart playlist on macOS or by scrolling through your library to see greyed out entries (songs you once added that have since been removed from the service).
If someone has a not so mainstream music taste, they are most likely better off buying their content separately.
Sadly I don't think you are joking. Set an alarm clock for lunch time and delete your 275 songs
I had the same issue back when I still had the occasional local files imported into iCloud Music library, all I had to do was edit the files meta data to obscure things and it forced an upload (which you could then „fix“ again in iTunes meta data editor). That did the trick and never replaced the original files with Apples offering.