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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

#231

Post by squarefoot »

StavrosK wrote: post #141
cies wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I stop being able to tell somewhere around 200 kbit MP3s (with cheap equipment) Yups. Me too. Even with cheap professional equipment I cannot hear the difference of lossless vs >= 192kbps MP3. > anything above that is wasted space. Unless you want to mix/remix/etc. Changing the pitch brings out the artifacts.

> Unless you want to mix/remix/etc. Changing the pitch brings out the artifacts. Certainly, you probably need lossless if you're going to do any sort of editing.

Lossless, and possibly upsampling before editing, but high end gear probably does that by default. As for bitrate compression, although I have a good musical ear, I can't find any appreciable difference from a high bitrate (320) mp3 and the corresponding lossless track, so no problems using mp3s to listen to music.

I also managed to resample my entire portable playlist (yeah, making mp3s out of mp3s, I know in some circles I could be killed just for thinking about that:*) to overcome that dreadful loudness craze that makes pretty much every track produced in the last 20-25 years destroy your ears if you happen to listen to it just after something 10 years older. Unfortunately all methods to level the tracks (mp3gain, replaygain etc.) don't work properly because they should analyze all tracks dynamic content, not just the average/maximum level, then first adjust their dynamics and later normalize their level. In other words, level compression should be applied more to softer tracks and not the other way around. So I faked a solution to the problem by reconverting my playlist after applying compression to an extremely low threshold, making clear to myself that none of those tracks would ever leave my player. Some sound really horrible, but I spared my ears.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#232

Post by ihuman »

crazygringo wrote: post #223

Does anyone have any idea how spatial audio will work orientation-wise with music? Existing spatial audio on iOS+AirPods puts the center channel (dialog) coming from your device, which makes sense since you're actively looking at it. But I listen to music while walking around the house. I'm constantly changing orientation. Does this mean the center channel will always be directly in front of me and therefore the "ban…

> Existing spatial audio on iOS+AirPods puts the center channel (dialog) coming from your device, which makes sense since you're actively looking at it

It doesn't do this directly. It resets the center when you keep your head still. Your head stays still when you're watching a video on your phone, so it sets the center to where your phone is. Try looking away from your phone after it centers the audio on your phone. After a few seconds, you'll hear the center "move" to where you're currently looking.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#233

Post by twobitshifter »

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’m not an audiophile, but a couple days ago my wife had the radio in the car on and I thought something was wrong with the stereo, the middle range of the music were missing. It was all snare and a muted bass. I tried adjusting the EQ, but it had no real effect. I was a little worried about my own hearing at this point, but I saw that the station was broadcasting in “HD.” I looked this up and HD apparently means that they broadcast in pretty low bitrates. I agree that there must be a point where the difference is negligible but people have taken the argument that you won’t hear the difference so far that they’re wiping out the heart of music on radio.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#234

Post by salamandersauce »

josteink wrote: post #125
salamandersauce wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they can't guarantee the Apple TV is hooked up to Atmos capable speakers. With the headphones and built-in speakers they know they can fake Atmos. Not so on a random TV.

> Because they can't guarantee the Apple TV is hooked up to Atmos capable speakers. Nonsense. Apple TV supports Dolby Atmos and can detect a compatible receiver/speaker when connected. iTunes on Apple TV offers hundreds of movies with Atmos-audio after all.

Yes! But they can't say it will play Atmos BY DEFAULT when they can't guarantee the speakers/receiver support Atmos. On their headphones speakers they can.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#235

Post by k_sze »

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…

Just a FYI in case you didn’t know, but Vorbis is kinda superseded by Opus now, which is a newer, royalty-free lossy codec that has a few nice qualities, such as, if I understand correctly, less decoding latency, higher compression ratio for similar perceptual quality. It has been the high quality audio codec for sites like Youtube for a while now.

I just wish digital audio players would pick it up.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#237

Post by tootie »

rektide wrote: post #211

Semi-worth pointing out that Google has done a couple spatial audio/ambisonics things over the years. The seemingly-abandoned VR initiative has/had spatial audio[1], provided by the open source Resonance Audio[2] library they open sourced, Omnitone for spatial audio on the web[3]. Omnitone dates back to 2016[4]! Not nearly the follow through/uptake. As usual I part blame Google, but in large part, it's just hard to g…

Spatial audio has been around since at least the 90s. More recently, Bose has been pushing their "AR" eyewear which is sunglasses with tiny speakers and an IMU.

https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/smart_products/sp_frames...

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#238

Post by StavrosK »

mimimi31 wrote: post #230
StavrosK wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does any of this matter? The point of a blind ABX test (and the whole question) is to see whether you can tell the difference between two formats. If you can, you can. Personally, I stop being able to tell somewhere around 200 kbit MP3s (with cheap equipment), anything above that is wasted space. You can run the tests as much as you want, if the hypothesis is that "people can't tell the difference between lossles…

>anything above that is wasted space Having lossless copies is still useful for storage and later transcoding. Even if you can't hear a difference between a 192kbit/s MP3 and a higher bitrate lossless file, you might be able to hear one after reencoding the MP3 using another lossy format.

Yes, I should have said "for casual listening".

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#239

Post by thrdbndndn »

agloeregrets wrote: post #43
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19

This had been rumored for about a month, but that it was a FREE upgrade was completely unexpected. We thought this would be a higher tier.

Yeah, this was a hard kick to Spotify's gut.

I don't think it would affect spotify much.

If anything it probably would totally kill Tidal.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#240

Post by StavrosK »

squarefoot wrote: post #231
StavrosK wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you want to mix/remix/etc. Changing the pitch brings out the artifacts. Certainly, you probably need lossless if you're going to do any sort of editing.

Lossless, and possibly upsampling before editing, but high end gear probably does that by default. As for bitrate compression, although I have a good musical ear, I can't find any appreciable difference from a high bitrate (320) mp3 and the corresponding lossless track, so no problems using mp3s to listen to music. I also managed to resample my entire portable playlist (yeah, making mp3s out of mp3s, I know in some c…

As far as I know, mp3 frames have a "volume" field, which is what mp3gain changes to losslessly change the volume of the entire track. Could you not take advantage of that too?
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