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

281–290 of 717 posts

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#281

Post by turtlebits »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #11

This is honestly quite exciting and I’m actually tempted to use get Apple Music to try this. However, it’s not really clear to me how I can play these tracks. Can I use my existing Dolby Atmos setup? If so, what kind of hardware do I need to connect? Can I use a HDMI dongle for my iPad, for example, to connect it to my receiver? Or is this only an Apple-specific thing that only works on Apple speakers. I’m afraid I a…

I've been also wondering the same. I have HomePods in stereo pair and have been trying to figure out how to play surround content on them that is not in the Apple ecosystem (via Apple TV).

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#282

Post by em500 »

robbyt wrote: post #123
marcodiego wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal experience: most people can not differentiate anything above 128kbps mp3. Some can, but don't care. A lot of people listen to music in noisy environments with lower quality blue-tooth devices that decrease audio quality even more and make it way harder to differentiate from anything better than 128kbps mp3. Most current music is heavily dynamic compressed leaving very little space to differentiate better cod…

Who are these people who can't hear the difference? And what sort of listen setup have you used to test this? Even my parents can hear the difference!

The German c't magazin did an extensive test back in 2000 using pricey audiophille equipment (Sennheiser Orpheus, B&W Nautilus 803). 256k MP3 was statistically tied with the Compact Disc source.

Translated article: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=27324.0

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#283

Post by 77pt77 »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #241
marcan_42 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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." I'll add to this that "high bitrate" for Opus can reasonably be considered as 128kbps or above, generally 160 or 192kbps are comfortably beyond what is needed to achieve audible transparency. For anyone who's used to…

> it's extremely impressive to hear how good Opus is, and how low bit rates you can get away with

24kpbs is perfectly adequate for voice/podcasts/audiobooks

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#284

Post by dashezup »

You would notice that the main difference between lossy and lossless formats is that lossless format keeps all of the stuff while lossy formats partially or wholly drop 20kHz+ if you compare with the spectrogram of them.

And there are good reasons to listen to lossy ones instead of lossless ones, you probably can't hear 20kHz+ sound but it will reduce your headroom if it's there, this especially matters when you play it in high volume because the vibration of the 20kHz+ sound cause could cause audio distortion. MQA is the proprietary audio encoding which deals with such problem, although it seems to be a bit debatable.

Lossless formats are especially important for music storage/archive/remixing. But I really can't hear the difference between opus-128k (vbr), mp3-320k (vbr/cbr) and lossless ones.

I just encode lossless music to opus 128k to listen to when it's possible. opus is a very decent audio format, it's wildly used for VoIP. I wouldn't go any higher than 128k for opus because it's recommended in Opus wiki[1], and I've compared the spectrogram between opus 128k (VBR) and mp3 320k (CBR) and there are only very a few of differences.

[1] https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#285

Post by armincerf »

layer8 wrote: post #271
crazygringo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either you keep your head stationary and get the non-Spatial Audio sound (i.e. what they optimized for 90%+ of their audience) I literally have no idea what you're talking about. Using Spatial Audio on my AirPods Pro is insanely better, and still very much spatial, even without actively moving my head. First, the sound appears to be coming from outside of my head, rather than between my ears -- no "headphone fatigu…

> the sound appears to be coming from outside of my head, rather than between my ears It’s a pity that Apple doesn’t provide that feature as a simple option that one can apply to any audio source.

It gets activated on any audio source in a surround sound format, it can’t be applied to stereo sources because stereo audio doesn’t contain any positional info

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#286

Post by donatj »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #8

Curious if this will be available on Windows and macOS when using a Dolby-capable receiver. It seems to be AirPod-only from the press release itself? Also curious if this will at some point also apply to Apple iTunes Match (the precursor to Apple Music) which lets you own rather than “rent” your music.

That's what I'm wondering as well. I used iTunes Match to actually replace a lot of my 20 year old 128k rips.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#287

Post by aejnsn »

I have been loyal to Spotify for almost a decade now as a paying customer. But they cannot even fix a bug on CarPlay with large playlists or improve their navigation in CarPlay to search playlists with text input. Loads of European cars have a text input mechanism (not touchscreen). Better yet, why not a voice search capability? I am tired of asking for simple app navigation features that should be no-brainers. I don’t know what Spotify is working on, everything feels like a second thought for the last few years. But this news from Apple makes me want to jump ship.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#288

Post by afavour »

crazygringo wrote: post #243
Someone1234 wrote: post #46

This is included/no additional cost which is fantastic. I do wonder if in the longer term if Apple's Spatial Audio with "dynamic head tracking" isn't the next 3D TVs/3D Content i.e. a gimmick. Taking traditional multi-source audio (Dolby/Atmos/etc) and jamming it into stereo is old tech, it doesn't work particularly well but is cheap to make/consume, thus mostly harmless. The new Spatial Audio is using gyroscopes to…

> Either you keep your head stationary and get the non-Spatial Audio sound (i.e. what they optimized for 90%+ of their audience) I literally have no idea what you're talking about. Using Spatial Audio on my AirPods Pro is insanely better, and still very much spatial, even without actively moving my head. First, the sound appears to be coming from outside of my head, rather than between my ears -- no "headphone fatigu…

I think most of what you're saying applies to 3D TV, too. And that ended up being a dud. IMO the problem with both is that they're an awful shared experience, and a lot of TV watching is done by more than one person at a time.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#289

Post by turtlebits »

SSLy wrote: post #242
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I originally posted a reply that remarked that we can buy Apple Lossless music from iTMS - however I did a quick check and to my surprise Apple still doesn't offer DRM-free lossless content on iTMS: you can only get Apple Lossless by ripping your own CDs. The "Apple Digital Masters" products are not actually "masters": they're still compressed with lossy encoding: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/7/20758633/apple-dig…

It's not like Tidal is good either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc

Tidal offers FLAC. I don't completely understand the associated formats via their quality settings, but definitely have downloaded FLAC when caching content to a device.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#290

Post by yingbo »

moogly wrote: post #175
yehaaa wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec. Secondly Apple has been using AAC since forever which is a successor to mp3 and an MPEG standard.

> The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec True. No one else bothers with it though, because why should they when FLAC exists? That makes ALAC, in practice, largely an Apple-only format.

As mentioned above, ALAC is an open source format, which has all benefits as other open source format e.g. FLAC.
Post reply on HN