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Music Apple

Apple Music is Getting Lossless and Spatial Audio Support (cnet.com) 80

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Apple Music subscribers will find a big chunk of the catalog sounds better next month: The service is adding support for high-quality, lossless and spatial audio through Dolby Atmos at no additional cost, it said Monday. It'll have 20 million lossless audio songs to start, with 75 million available by the end of 2021. From a report: To try out lossless audio, you should make sure you have the latest version of Apple Music and go to Settings, Music, then Audio Quality. You can choose different resolutions for cellular and Wi-Fi connections, or just download the track. The lossless tier starts at CD quality, which is 16 bit at 44.1 kHz, and goes up to 24 bit at 48 kHz and is playable natively on Apple devices. If you use external audio equipment, you can crank the quality up to 24 bit at 192 kHz. Further reading: AirPods Max, priced at $549, don't support Apple Music's lossless songs, Apple says.
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Apple Music is Getting Lossless and Spatial Audio Support More

Apple Music is Getting Lossless and Spatial Audio Support

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  • Subscribers will find... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:15PM (#61393610) Journal

    Apple Music subscribers will find no difference from increasing the resolution from 16/48, if they take the time to do a blind test.

    The 2% of them who have surround sound systems may find the 1% of albums that are mixed for Dolby Atmos sound cooler.

    • Re:Subscribers will find... (Score:4, Funny)

      by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:19PM (#61393632)
      You're way underestimating the placebo effect. Just as gold-ion infused metamaterial based cables sound _way_ better than plain old copper cables, even with digital data, I'm sure to plenty of people the higher resolution audio will sound every so much better than the plain old audio we plebs usually play.
      • (btw, I'm using "placebo effect" for lack of a better phrase, probably it's not really that)
      • Those people are kind of "spatial", though.

      • You're way underestimating the placebo effect.

        To be fair, the GPP said "blind test", which is the gold standard for weeding out the placebo effect.

        • Not in high-res audio, because in many cases the blind comparison is between two different masters. That's one of the bigger problems with streaming services, unlike a CD where every detail of the production process can be looked up, you never really know precisely what you're going to get. You type in a song in a streaming service and you get what you're given. Not the choice of the 70s master, the 90s remaster, the 25th anniversary edition, the mobile fidelity master, the Japanese UHQ release, or the SACD

      • For those who don't know how bad things got before most not just accepted but embraced MP3 files for their small size, I recall a shop that sold amplifiers at well over a month's minimum wage salary... They were adamant that with their high grade equipment, they were able to discern if the coaxial digital audio cable from the CD player to the DAC was plugged in the other way around or not.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      Username checks out...

    • Then why did bluray implement 24/192? If anything movies need less dynamic range and music needs more.

      • They did it for the same reason Apple did: it looks good on a spec sheet to people who don't understand the specs.

        As for what different content "needs", generalizing is not the way to go. But if you insist on generalizing, and look at the dynamic range you actually find "in the wild" on released media, you will find the opposite of your assertion. Most music has its dynamic range compressed at multiple stages during production process, on individual instruments and again for the final mixdown. Most movies e

        • Movies got so bad I finally bought a small external DAC and fed that into a Behringer compressor before going into my main amplifier. I don't care for surround sound so two speakers are fine. Watching movies is wonderful again, dialog is easily heard and music or explosions don't hurt my ears.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            This I like good quality audio but that does not mean knocking the art off the walls every-time there is a crash or explosion just to be able to have the volume up enough that the speech is audible - which the people mixing movies seem to think.

            Its a big reason I quit going to theaters long before the pandemic. The audio in most theaters is painfully loud at times.

            At home I have the amp on my center channel raised up, and I never turn off the 'night' mode (compress) on my receiver for movies.

      • bluray audio and beyond DTS-X and TrueHD sounds amazing with a decent setup, especially when they remix known songs properly to utilize the full dynamic range. The issue with "music" industry is they never bothered to push the edge of what is possible with audio when most users dont have the equipment. Home theater folks are just in a different league, pushing audio and video to the limit. If the industry stuck to the "most people wont notice it" theory, we would not have gorgeous HDR video today.
      • The real reason?

        Bluray holds 25GB a layer and a 1080p movie is 10-15GB tops. They needed a reason to fill up all that empty space so they chose audio. Notihng more, nothing less. It was wasted space they decided to fill since they had to go their own way to get more profit than going with HD-DVD.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          The real reason?

          Bluray holds 25GB a layer and a 1080p movie is 10-15GB tops. They needed a reason to fill up all that empty space so they chose audio. Notihng more, nothing less. It was wasted space they decided to fill since they had to go their own way to get more profit than going with HD-DVD.

          Most blu-rays are dual layer, and the movie is around 30-35GB. The total disk space used is around 45GB on average.

          Lesser catalog movies may be single layer, with around 22GB used.

          25GB was useless for Blu-Ray at the

          • Those movies are only that big because they chose to bulk it up with 24/96 8 channel uncompressed audio in a bunch of languages.

            The actual video is a lot smaller.

        • > 1080p movie is 10-15GB tops

          FALSE. Blu-ray have a maximum video bitrate of 40 MB/s, or 48 Mbit/s for both audio and video. Where are you getting those numbers from??? What you are describing is average bitrate.

          Avatar Blu-ray specs [fandom.com]

          The video is transferred to Blu-ray using MPEG-4/AVC with an average bitrate of 28.81Mbit/s (with peaks over 40Mbit/s) which takes 33GB of disc space.

          Back of the napkin calculation: Avatar has a runtime of 2h 42m. At 25 Mbits/s that is 162 mins * 25 Mbit/s = 9720 seconds *

    • Apple Music subscribers will find no difference from increasing the resolution from 16/48, if they take the time to do a blind test.

      There is a difference. Not as big as advertisers would like you to believe, but there is.

      I recently performed a test comparing a 24 bit, 384 KHz version of a song to a version down-sampled to CD quality in Logic Pro. Audio was played from Logic through a Scarlett 2i2 DAC interface. There is a significant difference. Anyone who says there is no difference needs to speak with a physicist, who will define the Nyquist limit for them.

      One note. I used high-end audio gear to test, but the difference can be heard o

      • Human hearing does not extend past 20 kHz. Nyquist says 48 kHz is fine, so long as your ADC and DAC have good antialiasing filters. What does Logic use for downsampling?

        ABX or GTFO.

        • Ask a physicist.

          To define a wavelength accurately, you need about 10 samples per cycle. 10. Otherwise, your CD player or software will just be interpolating smooth curves between the sparse data points at high frequencies. "Making it up," in other words.

    • Apple Music subscribers will find no difference from increasing the resolution from 16/48, if they take the time to do a blind test.

      Except they won't take the time to do a blind test, and will therefore find a difference, because psychoacoustics works like that. Users will expect to hear a difference so they will hear a difference as their brains justify the difference.

      A few of them may find albums mixed differently, and use that in a double blind test to reinforce their preconceived notion that high res = better as well.

    • Apple Music subscribers will find no difference from increasing the resolution from 16/48, if they take the time to do a blind test.

      Fact is that lots of people were asking for it, some very loudly, for whatever reason, and they are getting it now. Obviously some people just want to be contrary, or just want to dump on Apple for whatever reason, so I suspect there will be a few who blamed Apple for not providing lossless music, who will now blame them for providing it.

    • Atmost is same BS, different year. s/albums that are mixed for Dolby Atmos/content with appreciable surround content/ It's escalation for inside sales into a saturated market. Centers, subwoofers, surrounds. Oh but now you need *back* surrounds *and* side surrounds. So you can listen to the airplane on the demo disc.

  • 99.9% won't notice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:17PM (#61393618)

    80% probably can't tell the difference between 128 kbps MP3 and CD audio. Between 256 kbps AAC and CD audio, the difference is much more subtle.

    • Re:99.9% won't notice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lexman098 ( 1983842 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:20PM (#61393634)
      I mean were you hoping they'd make the quality worse? Even if a small percentage of people have a proper stereo setup, it's still a win.

      • even most of those with proper stereo setup can't hear the difference

        • and none of those proper setups are the same

          • Re:99.9% won't notice (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:56PM (#61393802) Homepage

            Do they use canned chocolate syrup [cmu.edu] to raise their speakers to the ideal height?

            • Good lord that should be nominated for an Ig Nobel Prize!

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Entrope ( 68843 )

                That reptile require them to have done actual research :) I was only a lowly undergrad at the time, and had no involvement with the letter other than getting a kick out of it being discussed (after the magazine actually published it!) on Zephyr, which was a real-time chat protocol. The authors were halfway of the opinion that the "chocolate moose" (sic), "squid with veg. broth" and "evaporated haggis" would be over the top. Apparently it was instead the kind of satire that inspired Poe's law.

        • We have to get the word out to all these people who are foolishly thinking they can hear a difference in quality when they don't even know they can't!

        • Re:99.9% won't notice (Score:4, Insightful)

          by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:55PM (#61393796) Homepage
          I for one am glad to see they are doing it instead of smashing the audio even more to cut the bit rate. I agree most will not be able to hear the difference and quite likely most recent material has already been squished and altered to death so even the lowest mp3 bitrate doesn't make a difference. But I have a few classical CD's that I wonder if a higher bit rate would make them even better. Certain recording engineers hit a perfect combo of mic placement, room acoustics, performer, where that violin sounds like it is in the room with you.

          • Just like with video, it probably doesn't make sense to use lossless codecs.
            You are likely better with lossy 8 channels 24-bit 192 kHz audio compared to lossless 16-bit 48 kHz 2 channels, even though both options can have the same bitrate.

            • Just like with video, it probably doesn't make sense to use lossless codecs.

              Actually it's nothing like video. Since lossless audio at rates that exceed the theoretical threshold of human hearing can be streamed using less data than a single Netflix stream in the lowest possible quality it absolutely makes sense not to pointlessly compress something.

              Video on the other hand... 4k60p at 24bpp consumes 11.9Gbit/s. So there it doesn't make sense to attempt to stream losslessly.

              You are likely better with lossy 8 channels

              Ever heard of quadrophonic records? They were invented in the 50s. You could buy quadrophonic vinyl in the 60s.

              • Video on the other hand... 4k60p at 24bpp consumes 11.9Gbit/s. So there it doesn't make sense to attempt to stream losslessly.

                Well you could have 720x480 lossless. Lossy compressed 4k looks much better however.

                • Yes indeed, we compress to improve. Interesting comparison though since the audio industry is going through this right now. With MQA trying to justify saying their *lossy* high resolution audio CODEC is better than lossless CD quality audio, a claim which they are currently being dragged through the mud for and rightfully so (with a hint of MPEG-LA level licensing fuckery to go with it).

                  In case you want to burn half an hour on something hopefully soon to be irrelevant: https://hackaday.com/2021/04/2... [hackaday.com]

                  • How quickly artifacts are accepted. I often see the rectangle effect on MPEG video with fast changing light/dark transitions. I guess it does not look bad, but it is not real. In video, I accept the tradeoff because as someone said, 4K lossless video is not happening. But 48K/16+ stereo bit audio is easily done. So why compress when you don't need to?
        • The data uplift will allow studio quality mixes to the public (CD quality is still not lossless just like DTS-X and Dolby TrueHD gave movies full blown dynamic range. Yes, you can tell different between AC3 and TrueHD with a small investment). The challenge now is if music producers will release their grand vision (studio audio mixes without crushed dynamic range) for public consumption, how do you enjoy it on audio gear like speakers - how do you get that audio path to a stereo amplifier? Airplay 2 has

        • Seems like you're bothered by this.

        • And most people don't give a shit about perfect colour rendition, or eliminating black crush from their LCDs either. That doesn't mean we should cater to the lowest common denominator.

    • This should actually be a noticeable improvement, especially for the people using BT headphones.

      Since the BT spec has its own codecs what you end up with is two sets of compression artifacts. Getting rid of one of them should really help.

      • On the contrary, given that BT audio is already compressed, to benefit this you must not be using BT at all.

        • It's the photocopy of a photocopy phenomenon, and yes it can matter.

          • it can, but the difference is even harder to hear than with good speakers

            • False. Single compression works by applying an acoustic model to the source material. That acoustic model is based on some assumptions, such as that the underlying content is a natural sound. In some cases that assumption is even based on the type of sound.

              As such compression of compression, especially when two different algorithms are used, tends to create some incredibly horrendous artefacts that are far more noticeable than any compression algorithm designed to compress natural sound in the least noticea

        • On the contrary-contrary, this is one of the corner cases where it actually might matter. Each pass of compression alters the signal just a bit, and multiple passes causes something akin to generation loss. This can add up to create an audible effect, even where the individual passes don't.

          The obvious solution, of course, is not to use Bluetooth audio. But then Apple can't charge you.

          • Take an original, non-compressed audio file. Compress it to AAC 256 kbps. Uncompress it, and compress the result to whatever bluetooth uses.
            Now skip the AAC and compress straight from original to bluetooth.

            I bet there is less difference between the two than comparing an AAC 256 kbps to uncompressed audio.

            But anyways, anyone who cares about that doesn't use bluetooth audio to begin with.

            • Take an original, non-compressed audio file. Compress it to AAC 256 kbps. Uncompress it, and compress the result to whatever bluetooth uses.

              Just good that Apple's bluetooth implementation transmits AAC 256 kbps without any transcoding. Bluetooth audio standards have been upgraded significantly in recent years.

    • Much like a 1080p vs 4k display. Most people cannot see the difference, unless they are comparing the two.

      For a lot of technology we are putting in a lot of money and effort into tracing down the 9s.
      Back in the 1980's - 1990's when I had upgraded my 8086 (Amstrad CPC1512) to a Custom 486dx with SVGA and Soundblaster. The difference was extremely noticeable, even after 5 years. CGA display (for most games), PC Speaker Beeps, To SVGA 800x600 256 color display (1meg video card), and a sound card that could a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Difference between 256kbps MP3 and CD audio is beyond most people. Even then the vast majority that can tell a difference won't be able to tell you which is which.

      • The difference is that you can compress CD audio to 96kbps opus and get an essentially transparent result. If you only have MP3, your storage-constrained devices are stuck with that obsolete 90s codec until the end of time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      I would expect the number to be closer to 99% wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a good modern well encoded 128kbps track and a CD track in a double blind test, I know what audio encoding artefacts sound like and I'd have great difficulty telling the difference. (Do yourself a favour, don't learn what audio artefacts sound like, there's a good chance you'll notice these artefacts a lot more and regret the distraction.)

    • Actually on a reasonable setup most people can hear the difference between compressed and lossless on many songs. The difference is 128k is big, with 256k it is still there. I sometimes demo it to sceptical friends.
      The difference from lossless with higher bit depths is more subtle. With good recordings of complex, layered acoustic music there is a bit more depth and air around the music, you have slightly more the impression that the artists are there in front of you. Again, repeatable with visiting friend

  • You will need ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:24PM (#61393654)

    ... the AirPod subwoofer [digitalmusicnews.com] to take full advantage of the higher quality.

  • Two questions, sir (Score:3)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:28PM (#61393670)
    1. Does this apply only to the "all you can hear" Music subscribers, or can you also download (purchase from the Music Store) with that quality?
    2. If yes, can I re-download the music purchased in the past from Apple to get the better quality?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      1. Does this apply only to the "all you can hear" Music subscribers, or can you also download (purchase from the Music Store) with that quality?

      Probably at first only the subscription service. Interestingly, it's a shot across the bow at services like Tidal which charge gobs of money per month for lossless, while Apple Music tosses it in for free. Did I mention Tidal is constantly in trouble?

      Apple a number of years ago purchased a music store that served up lossless files, so it's possible they're going to

    • On 1 - I read somewhere that yes you can download it like you can do with normal Apple must c. Good for use on the go.

    • Apple has confirmed to The Verge [theverge.com] that lossless audio is exclusive to Apple Music and thus subscription-only. The company won’t offer music purchases in lossless quality, nor will there be any way to upgrade owned tracks to lossless with the paid iTunes Match service.

      Well that's disappointing. Maybe later?

  • Does it go to 11? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mr. Barky ( 152560 ) on Monday May 17, 2021 @01:44PM (#61393746)

    All this sounds great... but the question I really want answered: does it go to 11?

  • So, the big question for me is: Are the lossless 24bit 192 kHz tracks actually mastered from the source at a quality equal to or higher than that? If not, then it's just not going to add any quality and use up bandwidth.

    Also if they use any dynamic range compression on any of the "lossless" versions, it really defeats the purpose of the "extra" quality since all the tracks will be distorted for listening in "challenging" environments and adding more resolution doesn't unfix the abhorrent application of d

    • Very few albums are produced for anything more than 2 channels. Most studios don't have the equipment. Most producers don't work with it. Most consumers can't play it.

      So yes, unless they are selecting the 1% of albums actually mixed beyond stereo, they will be weird "spacialized" upmixes. I was doing that on my own 15 years ago, for free, with a DSP in foobar2000. I quit doing it because it sucked.

    • So, the big question for me is: Are the lossless 24bit 192 kHz tracks actually mastered from the source at a quality equal to or higher than that? If not, then it's just not going to add any quality and use up bandwidth.

      Apple has whatever the record company gave them. Could be CD, could be 24bit 192kHz. What they have done for several years is to sell / stream 256kbit AAC that was compressed directly from the best quality they had; and since CD is also compressed by resampling and throwing 8 bits away, that's better quality than you would get by ripping your CDs.

      if they have 24bit 96kHz for example and nothing better, then streaming 192kHz would be beyond stupid, so I'll assume they wouldn't do it. I'd assume if you cho

  • Music already sounds good enough from Amazon, but the best part is that now I shouldn't be nagged to upgrade every time I open the Amazon music app.

  • ...would be perfect to listen to the bootleg quadraphonic release of The Dark Side of The Moon.

    Unfortunately, Apple can't send the required drugs to enhance the enjoyment of that album, tho

  • Spatial Audio will be a much more important feature than lossless, by a large margin.

    Even more so when Apple's version of augmented/virtual reality come out.

    I just hope they go beyond Dolby Atmos and add in pure Ambisonics.

  • The lossless offer is a pointless joke, since apple removed the headphone output from most devices
    and there is no lossless wireless audio transfer, not even with those $600 headphones they sell.

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