Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 717 posts

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#181

Post by schmorptron »

mikestew wrote: post #63
josteink wrote: post #18

> By default, Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, as well as the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple TV seems oddly missing in that list. Edit: If anything is to be expected to be connected to a surround Atmos setup, it would be a TV-room audio-setup. Edit 2: Confirmed supported.

The fine print seems to have a slightly different story by my reading: “How can I listen to Dolby Atmos music? All Apple Music subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV can listen to thousands of Dolby Atmos music tracks using any headphones (emphasis mine). When you listen with compatible Apple or Beats headphones, Dolby Atmos music plays back automatically when available…

Oh. So no word on the Android app yet?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#182

Post by est31 »

floatboth wrote: post #110

Is there any open source spatial audio thing out there? Or is everything just some proprietary magic with a brand like Dolby?

opus has an ambisonics profile:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8486

* https://jmvalin.ca/opus/opus-1.3/

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#183

Post by spawnthink »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #38
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

Not sure how reflective that test is, since my perception is already primed by noticing the loading time per sample

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#184

Post by kjakm »

ricokatayama wrote: post #48

the question here is: how to convert the current songs to the atmos format. For now we have few artists with the standard, but it’s almost mandatory to have the whole catalog if they want to make it popular

Some sort of computerised/automated conversion process would be awful given the mix has such an important artistic role in the song.

Maybe, in the same way we've seen artists go back and remaster entire collections, we will see them do something similar for atoms?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#185

Post by arbaal »

marcan_42 wrote: post #89
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates. Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all sample…

Yeah, 96kHz/24bit is only really useful for production, since it makes it more foolproof and harder to mess up your recording.

But storing music over 48kHz and 16bit for comsumption is really just waste of storage space and pure snake oil. 16 bit give a dynamic range of 96dB and I'm not aware of any recording outside of experiments that take advantage of it. Even the most expensive speaker / headphones will distort terribly if you play them on the loudness level where this dynamic range would matter...

And most "high quality" recordings with a high frequency range (96kHz+) only really add ultrasonic sound and mostly noise artefacts that don't correlate to the music recorded (and that no speaker / headphones can even reasonably, without high distortions, reproduce, if they even pass the LPF of the reproduction chain).

So yeah, I also think that 48/16 is all we need for optimal consumption. If the format is lossless, it's also nice for archival reasons.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#186

Post by dsr_ »

objclxt wrote: post #96
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have plastic shiny disks that are DRM free. They’re actually pretty great, lossless, and no monthly fees. They are called _Compact Discs_ and you can get them pretty cheap these days!

> They’re actually pretty great, lossless CDs aren't lossless unless the material was recorded at or below 16 bit/44.1kHz. You can argue whether the difference is perceptible - some blind studies suggest not - but this fact is what led to a variety of semi-obscure audiophile disc formats that offered higher sampling rates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD ).

That's not a definition of lossless that anyone else uses.

The definition of lossless is that either no compression algorithm was used or the compression algorithm is capable of precisely recreating the original bits in as bits out. If you feed a lossless mechanism an 8 bit 3.5KHz mono bitstream, it must reproduce the same 8 bit 3.5Khz mono bitstream at the other end. Quality out equals quality in.

In your definition, no sound is ever lossless because no microphones can ever capture the complete audio experience available from a live performance - if you move your head a quarter of a wavelength, the sound will change.

That's why we don't use that definition.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#187

Post by websites420 »

capableweb wrote: post #2

Maybe I was reading it all too quickly but they never seem to outline the format they'll actually use for the lossless songs. Anyone happen to know? Edit: Seems they are using their own format ALAC, sad but not surprising

It’s sad that Apple is using an open source codec for their streaming service? Why?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#188

Post by Someone1234 »

dagmx wrote: post #100
Someone1234 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, so you're getting degradation/distortion of the audio source most of the time . That's why most people try it a couple of times then turn it off.

I'm not sure agreeing with my point backs up what you're saying. I'm saying we turn our heads regularly, so the Spatial audio works well most of the time.

I am agreeing that you cannot keep your head completely still, and then pointing out that that fact means Spatial Audio is constantly causing audio adjustments with seemingly no basis which degrades the listening experience.

The argument that Spatial Audio makes more tiny adjustments is an argument against Spatial Audio, not an argument for it.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#189

Post by marcodiego »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #44
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

I have plastic shiny disks that are DRM free. They’re actually pretty great, lossless, and no monthly fees. They are called _Compact Discs_ and you can get them pretty cheap these days!

I think the biggest difficulty right now is that streaming is probably more lucrative for distributors, so there's very little incentives for artists to continue releasing albums. Buying compact discs is something that will likely get increasingly harder to do.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#190

Post by nceqs3 »

ivraatiems wrote: post #35
vr46 wrote: post #12

Who knew I would be locked into Spotify not by the music quality, but by playlists, friends, apps using it, and their Discovery mechanisms. Apple and Tidal may have awesome quality, but apps like https://musicleague.app/ have gotten me through Lockdown, and it turns out that these value props are very strong. I always thought I would instantly switch to a service for its audio quality, but then again, I can also buy…

Agreed - Spotify's UI is bad and getting worse, and its quality is meh, but its discovery features are top notch and it has the biggest catalog. I have audiophile equipment - $900 MSRP Hifiman headphones, discrete DAC and amp - and I tried Tidal to see if I could hear a difference. 99% of the time, I can't... and Tidal's MQA format is questionable anyway. (Not sure about Apple's "ALAC" either.) I used a playlist impo…

@Spotify. Why is there no 2FA yet? Why can't I customize my homepage? Why can't I have unlimited artists on my recent searches?
Post reply on HN