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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

#581

Post by CharlesW »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #557
CharlesW wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 The simplest explanation is that the public materials and tools are just sadly out of date.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…

Ah, that makes sense, thanks!

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#582

Post by billiam »

frereubu wrote: post #455
simias wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree,…

> What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? An orchestra is a large number of instruments spread across a wide stage. Each of those instruments is its own sound source. The audio cortex in the brain is highly tuned to understand things like the 3D location of sounds from cues generated by factors like the indiv…

It's like folks are talking past each other here. There appear to be a substantial number of (I assume younger)posters that have never been to something like a symphony orchestra and don't see the point when they can geek out with FLAC at home. Maybe the orchestras should advertise "Come see our array of 120 separate high end speakers" and the kidz would respond.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#584

Post by galaxyLogic »

But, is it a value in itself to reproduce the original sound perfectly? What if the processed sound is better?

When you listen to an LP you can hear cracks and pops. But when you sit in a concert-hall you can hear people coughing. You can sometimes hear people talking.

You can hear reverberation of the hall, that is not natural is it? It does not come from the players' instruments.

How much enjoyment does it take away from you if the music is not absolutely perfectly rendered the way it sounded in the concert hall?

At home when you listen to your super-stereoes you can hear sounds from the building, sounds from the street and sound of the wind and rain. Does it kill your enjoyment?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#585

Post by floatingatoll »

floatingatoll wrote: post #255
moogly wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Oh, if you're using homebrew and you want ffmpeg to support ALAC, you can do that. brew edit ffmpeg; add `depends_on "fdk-aac"` and `--enable-libfdk-aac`, `--enable-nonfree` to the relevant sections, remove the bottle section; then, brew reinstall ffmpeg. There's probably a better way to do this that doesn't trigger a merge conflict each time they update the bottle hashes (resolved easily with brew edit ffmpeg, repeat above), but I'm lazy and ffmpeg doesn't update frequently. I have no idea if ffmpeg can maintain ID3 tags from FLAC->ALAC or not, but if you have need of this knowledge someday, say hi to that future for me!

(And if compilation fails with a specific weird error about corefoundation corevideo coreaudio etc, uninstall and reinstall your macOS command line tools, because they're broken; `sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools ; xcode-select --install` will do that.)

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#586

Post by Slow_Hand »

jachee wrote: post #574
Slow_Hand wrote: post #564

For anyone here who is interested in the hi-fi audio experience and may be getting caught up in the debate over higher sampling rates and bit-depths, I'd like to suggest that any improvement Apple's hi-res audio is going to offer in sonic quality is nothing compared to the benefits of treating the acoustics in your listening space. Or conversely the destructive effects of NOT treating your room. In an untreated room,…

My "listening space" seldom exceeds an inch from my head. Either AirPods Pro or Sennheisers right in/on my ears. That's going to be the target audience of the majority of these changes. I choose 'phones because my music taste diverges too much from my wife's to make open air play an option, if I want to maintain peace.

You're right that wearing headphones sidesteps that issue entirely. It's only an issue when there is an acoustic space for the waves to interact with.

I'd also agree that Apple's choice seems to be targeting headphone users as a result of their product ecosystem.

Interestingly, people in the other discussions are pointing out that Airpod Pros and Airpods Max are incapable of higher sample-rate audio due to their codec. So it seems for now that Apple headphone users aren't going to experience any difference and that the hi-res issue only applies to stereo systems that have the capability. But then I'd just reiterate my original point that there's functionally no benefit to hi-res audio if your listening space is working against you (which most people's rooms are).

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#587

Post by dmerks »

gauravphoenix wrote: post #422

Just got this email from Amazon Music- We have some great news for you – going forward, there will be no extra charge for HD as part of your Amazon Music Unlimited subscription. You will continue to have full access to all of your HD content, but at no additional cost. This change will be reflected in your next billing cycle.

I received a notification, I had to open the app and upgrade for free by pressing a button. I have an annual family plan.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#588

Post by scythe »

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".

Yes, but lossless audio is still useful for transcoding. If you want to play music on your phone, and you have plenty of fixed hard drive space on your desktop (which is very cheap), it's rational to compress with an advanced codec to ~90 kbps since your headphones probably aren't good enough to pass anything more hi-fi and you want space for pictures and videos. However, if your downloads come lossy compressed, you'll introduce transcoding artifacts; you can get around this by transcoding at a significantly higher bitrate, but now the compressed file is wasting space!

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#589

Post by threeseed »

nitrogen wrote: post #548
objclxt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ).

If the original has a SNR less than 96dB (120dB effectively with shaped dithering), and no frequencies above 20kHz, then CD is lossless.

30% of people tested could hear 26Khz. 10% could hear 28Khz.

https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.2761883

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#590

Post by Ericson2314 »

eikenberry wrote: post #527
yingbo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The main benefit of lossless is the ability to convert to other formats, including other lossless formats that might have better longevity. So as long as you can convert it to FLAC once downloaded it is doing its job.

Yes exactly. And likewise with trying to avoid DRM via some sort of loopback device that is now lossless too.

I can't information theoretically argue for this. But I can algebraically argue lossless conversion rather than storage is great, and this seems great for the war against bad IP legal regimes.

Too bad they are probably only doing this because they feel that with streaming's dominance, the IP regime is not at risk.

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