I penned a letter to Oliver Schusser (the VP of Apple Music and Beats) addressing some of my concerns with today’s announcement. I’ll paste it below. The first point, about AirPods not being able to play back lossless audio, has already been confirmed and clarified since this morning. The original press release specifically mentioned that 24/192 will require a wired DAC (no surprise there) and claims that the Air Pods are “compatible” with lossless audio, but the fact remains that the lossy AAC codec is still being used for the connection. If Apple chooses to never sell lossless audio I won’t lose sleep over it, I will continue making my purchases elsewhere much as I have already been doing for the past 10 years. Proper FLAC support is a much bigger deal to me though. I remain hopeful this will be addressed in a future revision to iTunes, however completely frustrated and disgusted that this is still an issue at this point in time.
Probably not enough interest to make it a priority for the developers. Are itunes sales even a significant figure anymore?
Given this will be a "free" add on, one can't complain. But the difference between "lossless" and the highest compressed streaming bitrate music is indistinguishable in most listening environments. And the Atmos stuff will be a wait and see thing--who's going to provide content? I don't see anything about HIGH RES lossless, which would truly be significant, if (and only if) Apple were going to provide access to a significant library of high res content.
Well this is disappointing: https://www.t3.com/news/airpods-max-and-airpods-pro-dont-support-apple-music-lossless-apple-confirms
Am I the only one to have unsatisfactory experiences with Apple Lossless? Years ago, I discovered that anything that I converted to ALAC (it must have been through iTunes) ended up with audible artifacts, making it worse than even mp3. Since I don't have any Apple devices apart from two ancient Shuffle players, I abandoned it in favor of non-proprietary options, mostly flac. I am wary of any Stereophile review in which the sources used to evaluate components are primarily ALAC. Atkinson is particularly guilty of this, but he's not alone.
Lossless Audio Apple Music will also make its catalog of more than 75 million songs available in Lossless Audio. Apple uses ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) to preserve every single bit of the original audio file. This means Apple Music subscribers will be able to hear the exact same thing that the artists created in the studio. To start listening to Lossless Audio, subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music can turn it on in Settings > Music > Audio Quality. Here, they can choose different resolutions for different connections such as cellular, Wi-Fi, or for download. Apple Music’s Lossless tier starts at CD quality, which is 16 bit at 44.1 kHz (kilohertz), and goes up to 24 bit at 48 kHz and is playable natively on Apple devices. For the true audiophile, Apple Music also offers Hi-Resolution Lossless all the way up to 24 bit at 192 kHz.1
For #1: as long as you have an active Apple Music subscription, anything in your library (purchased, matched or added from the Apple Music catalog) will play back in lossless (if there is a lossless version available, obviously). For #2, the answer is no. This is purely an Apple Music benefit. BTW, there is no reason to pay for iTunes Match if you have Apple Music. AM contains all the features of iM.
If it's important to you you should consider being an Apple Music subscriber because Apple does the "melding personal and public" better than anyone else (IMO). I have hundreds of tracks from out of print albums or CDs that will never be on streaming, all the music I make myself, and so on, mixed together with the Apple content. It all appears as one big library, there's no "your stuff" vs "their stuff" sections or anything like that. To upload your personal stuff, just drop it into Music.app on a Mac or iTunes on Windows. It will automatically sync to all your signed-in devices.
I have hundreds if not thousands of files in ALAC. They are bit-for-bit identical to the original aiff/wav. It's true lossless, same as FLAC. Filesizes for ALAC are almost the same as FLAC too. If you were hearing artifacts it had something to do with the playback chain, not the encoding.
Does this mean that Apple will introduce a lossless iPod? There's been no sign of a substantial iPod upgrade for years, and yet they still have them in their hardware line-up.
iPods have always been able to play Apple Lossless files (just not hi rez (referring to Classic models)).
What i really want to know if is lossless will be available 1: in the iTunes store? 2: if yes, can i upgrade previously bought content? When they upgraded to drm free downloads, you could upgrade for free.
Just checked my iPhone 11 and I don't have an "audio quality" option under Settings>Music. No biggie. I usually copy everything to my iTunes library in ALAC anyway.
Of course, you are right – with lossless m4a - which I never use, due to space restrictions and the perception that iPods are not really high quality reproduction. I hope they redesign the line. They also might add support for FLAC and have a lot more storage.
Apple Music to get hi-res lossless streaming for no extra charge in June Looks like Apple devices will finally support hi-res audio natively. Hopefully this also applies to music transferred to the device and not just Apple Music.
Hi gang! I'm fairly certain I've been hearing APPLE experimenting with this so-called Spetial Audio with Dolby Atmos. Yes, iOS devices are indeed Chinese crap with lousy internal speakers, but what can one expect from their tiny size? However, I have been startled recently when sampling music in noticing the soundstage extending far beyond my iPhone's speakers even with the device at arm's length! How is this even possible?
On an iPhone 12, if you listen to Amazon Music HD using the Lightning to 3.5mm dongle, it can plays/streams up to 24-bit/48 kHZ. That's because the iPhone uses the DAC included in the dongle. So it's possible that Apple will release a dongle with better resolution when the ALAC-HiRez becomes available.
Well this is awesome news. I can kill two birds (Qobuz and Spotify) with one stone (Apple). I hate Qobuz’s interfaces - they are always wonky.
ALAC has been open source for at least a couple of years now and easily interconverts to FLAC, WAV or AIFF. So as others have pointed out, the problem is not with ALAC it is with someting in your system
I welcome this, even as someone who has struggled to hear no difference between high res qoboz streams and Apple Music. As other have said, integrating your personal collection with what’s on the service makes it an easy choice for me.
