While in modern music I do not remember songs with impressive stereo effects, most of the albums that I was listening when I was young, both rock music albums and classical music albums, were severely degraded when listened in mono.
Name an example, and name the effect that was significant enough to the upshot of the song that mixing the stereo channels down to a single mono channel would lose prime information for the listener. I'm not saying there aren't examples, but I want to listen directly to an example you would consider severely degraded if heard in mono (i.e., stereo channels mixed down to mono and then just copied to two channels).
Beatles albums have a lot of hard pans on them as I recall.
Can't wait to listen to 192kHz/24-bit on my macOS desktop with my preexisting 192kHz/24-bit audio pathway!
This is what I'm excited about, too. I work as a developer during the day, but have my home recording setup in the same room, and listen to Apple Music (or other services) all day through that. I don't think we're in the majority, though.
I'm grateful they threw us a bone. Hope it's out soon.
> 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…
> 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…
I agree. For me the limiting factor is not necessarily whether it is poodles high quality encoded or lossless. For "normal" music the bottleneck is often the recording. With good headphones it is easy to differantiate good from not so good recordings. I
For me a lot of recordings on Tidal/qobuz did not sound better than HQ on Spotify
Apple can add feature after feature, but if Music continues to split albums without warning, it's close to useless. I can't curate a music library when I can't rely on my music not being jumbled around. Dropping music for licensing issues is one thing, but messing with metadata is beyond frustrating. For arbitrary reasons, Apple Music will: remove songs from albums and re-add them to your library as the "single" or "…
I've definitely seen this happen as well. It's extremely frustrating. Looking at your screenshots, I'm guessing these were all albums that were matched to your existing library?
I might be misunderstanding, but I think that PDF is about how to master your music such that it will sound good after they convert it to AAC. It doesn't actually speak to the audio that's sent to them. Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Likely earlier, that's just when the code got moved into source control. That actually predates the copyright on tha…
> Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Cool, I take your word for it. Thanks! The referenced document only talks about AAC masters, and the tools at https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/ only create AAC masters. The simplest explanation is that the public materials and tools are just sadly out of date.
I'm pretty sure nucleardog is correct and that Apple wants 24/96KHz minimum sent to them; the PDF you linked to actually says that under "Best Practices" -- "To take best advantage of our latest encoders, use only 24-bit sources and send us the highest-resolution master file possible, appropriate to the medium and the project." Then Apple encodes their AACs using the tools and methods described in that document. If I understand it correctly, they're basically trying to ensure that the downsampling from 24/96 to 16/44 preserves as much information as possible. (Does it really make a difference? No idea. But it does mean that Apple has a whole lot of music they can re-encode at varying quality levels.)
AirPod Pro and Max will not support it. https://www.imore.com/airpods-max-dont-support-apple-musics-...
Apple must have been aware of bluetooth data transfer restrictions when designing AirPod Max.. Seems odd that they didn't include onboard storage for lossless songs, or enable lossless support for AirPod Max while tethered to a MacBook. If this is a codec issue as the article indicates is there any potential for a software fix?
BT 5.0 in theory could probably stream lossless so it is a bit weird they didn't consider it. Maybe they did and it wasn't really stable enough longer distances.
But not being able to be tethered without using a digital to analog to digital adapter is so silly. Come on apple.
Honestly, the Plex app is very decent for music libraries these days. Except for oddball VA releases and obscure mixtapes I find Plex to often be terrific at library management.
I've avoided using it because of concerns about library size. I want to move off of iTunes (launch a VM just for this) but nothing else seems to really handle managing a library. Currently trying out Airsonic but it is kind of slow and I can't edit tags with it. Maybe time to give Plex a try for this.
I run all songs / albums through MusicBrainz Picard before putting them in the music directory structure so they're fully tagged. It only misses some of the more local / esoteric stuff I've got.
I've been storing my FLAC files as ALAC for iTunes compatibility for the past decade. Max.app on macOS, while old and creaky looking, does a fine job of transcoding them and maintaining tags.
Now imagine storing it in FLAC and playing them everywhere, without having to transcode at all.