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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

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Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#301

Post by nxc18 »

greenmana wrote: post #221

These days I tend to navigate more towards services that pay more to the artists for streams. In this I've found Tidal to be a good combo of lossless and master level audio with also a higher amount of money going to the musicians per stream. It actually also has pretty good suggestions and other stuff once you've first used for a little while, which was the biggest reason I've stayed with Spotify til now.

Their tech, at least on iOS, needs investment.

I had to drop Tidal after trying for a month. CarPlay was a disaster, it just didn’t work well, very laggy, things didn’t always play, it wasn’t great about handling offline playlists.

Separately, they will log you out randomly, locking you out of your offline library. Spotify has never done this to me. I had to buy WiFi on a flight, unnecessarily, to unlock the offline library that I painstakingly downloaded earlier that day.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#302

Post by reaperducer »

Loughla wrote: post #195
CannisterFlux wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on bog-standard Android, Ogg files tend not to be as well supported by random music programs compared to MP3. I re-ripped a few CDs in MP3 that I'd also foolishly done to ogg just have them play gapless in VLC I think it was (might have been some other app, I forget now), otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. And another app I use to slow down or pitch shif…

>otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. Oh christ, this is my least favorite thing about newer audio formats. Some of the old albums were meant to be heard in one stretch; there are no gaps between tracks, because you're hearing a story. Then comes mp3 and digital audio, with a second pause between them. It just kills me. I get accused of being a hipster by my fa…

In my collection, this is most evident with Home by the Sea/Second Home by the Sea from Genesis.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#303

Post by afavour »

slownews45 wrote: post #297
afavour wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's weird because I've had the BEST experience with apple in terms of shared experiences. I go to share audio on my iphone, then I share with my wifes airpods. Seems to work fine.

Everyone is different, I suppose. A shared TV watching experience where we're both plugged into our own isolated audio and can't hear each other talk would be an awful experience for me.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#304

Post by [deleted] »

slownews45 wrote: post #297
afavour wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's weird because I've had the BEST experience with apple in terms of shared experiences. I go to share audio on my iphone, then I share with my wifes airpods. Seems to work fine.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#305

Post by sbr464 »

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…

I’ve recently been testing the master quality on Tidal, and was excited initially to see the Tidal Atmos offerings, but sadly Atmos isn’t available on the desktop app. I haven’t decided yet if I can hear the difference between Spotify/Tidal masters using a pair of Genelec Monitors.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#306

Post by iDisagreedEar »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #178
simias wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter, it's good marketing. It's not rational, but it lets Apple posture as being "high end". The utter majority of people won't be able to tell the difference but then again the utter majority of people won't even try to test it. I know that I personally can't even tell the difference between Spotify's "mid" and "high" quality settings the vast majority of the time even in perfect listening conditions wi…

People are downvoting you but you're not wrong. One of the biggest factors behind Apple's success is that they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. They're the Prada of the tech world. I switched from an iPhone to an Android recently and found the quality of the device and software to be just as good if not better, but an Android doesn't say "I'm upper middle class" like an iPhone does. Me, I see spatial audi…

I got an IPhone for work and I was extremely excited during unpackaging and giving my personal information to Apple.

It took only a few weeks for disappointment over slow transitions, buggy apps, and annoying updates.

Today I'm not sure how I could live without a few Android exclusive things, Linux, ad block, macros. They might be available for IPhone, but it's mind numbingly easy to get started.

Final complaint, our grandparents got iPhones because it was supposed to be easy. Apple logins and lingo made it difficult to use.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#307

Post by HatchedLake721 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #193
solarmist wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cart before the horse doesn’t sound very Apple like. They’re the kind to keep it private and mess with it until they find a use for it and get it working very well. Instead they’d just find a way to make the battery bigger because they know people care a ton about that. Also, everyone keeps talking about consciously moving your head around. Record yourself doing something on your computer for 5 minutes and watch…

> The cart before the horse doesn’t sound very Apple like. They’re the kind to keep it private and mess with it until they find a use for it and get it working very well. Force Touch.

It's working very well on iPhones and Apple Watches and has great use cases. It was axed on newer iPhones because of discoverability issues and little amount of people being even aware it exists and how to use it.

I still miss force touch on keyboard to move cursor around (instead of pressing spacebar, holding it and waiting)

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#308

Post by duped »

dashezup wrote: post #284

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's more like 17k, and the energy above 20k is almost so low it probably isn't adding much headroom. Not that you need it anyway.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#309

Post by Retric »

StrictDabbler wrote: post #136
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you couldn’t hear the difference". But historically a key reason for people to prefer e.g. SACD releases of recordings is not because one can hear the extra frequencies of this format, but because the SACD release – being targeted at people with a good stereo and sile…

Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies. Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over. Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have…

I have been surprised in both directions where what I thought was live music was prerecorded and what I thought was prerecorded turned out to be live music. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, audio equipment has gotten really good and audio standards are based around what people notice.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#310

Post by sporkland »

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…

I could hear the difference on the first question on my pixel 5 phone speakers.
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