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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

#341

Post by fudged71 »

kjakm wrote: post #124

If you're interested in what this might sound like (spatial audio) the announcement video uses it. To watch it you need to be using your iOS device + AirPods: https://music.apple.com/gb/music-movie/spatial-audio-on-appl...

I’m on the latest iOS beta with AirPods Pro. In Chrome the media element won’t open. When I open in Safari it takes me to the Apple Music app, which can’t play the trailer because I don’t have an account.

It’s like they’re warning me the problems with walled gardens.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#342

Post by SSLy »

turtlebits wrote: post #289
SSLy wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alright, yes, it uses the container, but files that are scrambled with MQA are worse quality than CD-rips. Even if no MQA decoding is involved.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#344

Post by meristohm »

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 my two kilobits: I also prefer FLAC and Ogg and Opus, and after some testing I settled on 24kbps mono Opus for audiobooks and 96kbps stereo Opus for anything more than spoken. I was limited by storage on my old Android device, and my earbuds were whatever. I now have better headphones (~$60?) and speakers (~$130?) and am sometimes transported back to my teens and the wonder of listening to music in all its breadth and depth.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#345

Post by ivraatiems »

formerly_proven wrote: post #225
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add to this comment, the video breakdowns I've watched on MQA are interesting listens even as someone who doesn't use Tidal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc -- Critque of MQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZ5hDzQ5Jg -- in defense of MQA At the end of the day, people should listen to what they think sounds good (is this an opinion?). If a placebo makes someone enjoy something more, is it really…

That's not really the point here - if someone says "I like how this sounds with (MQA artifacts | tube distortions | +20 dB bass)", that's perfectly fine and not something many if any people would argue with.

That's fine, but it's not fine to claim MQA is lossless or represents the original lossless file.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#346

Post by throwaway34241 »

unfamiliar wrote: post #209
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Every time this comes up someone says this. I've never seen anyone actually doing it. e.g. a video of setting up a double blind test of this and someone actually passing consistently. When I've challenged people IRL who claim the same thing the response is always "Well, obviously I can't do it with any of the audio gear that eith…

So many of these posts aren't specifying the exact compression format / bitrate they used for the test though. It's obviously possible to pass at some level of compression, but what I really want to know is if anyone can pass a double blind test at a high bitrate on a modern codec vs uncompressed.

The codecs obviously represent human-audible information much more efficiently than raw PCM samples. I'm not sure why the quality couldn't scale up (by increasing the bitrate) until it surpasses 100% of human hearing limits (since there's a lot of headroom to increase the bitrate and still be smaller than uncompressed). Maybe some formats have hard-coded frequency cutoffs (that don't change with the bitrate) that are too low for 1% of the population, but there's enough format choice that it would be surprising if they all had that problem.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#348

Post by parasubvert »

symlinkk wrote: post #161
nathancahill wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They support Apple Lossless, .m4a/.alac same as the old iPods.

No one uses ALAC, the industry standard is FLAC and has been that way for years, it’s pure arrogance that they continue to refuse to support it.

"no one uses ALAC" except every iPod, iTunes, iOS user that wants lossless playback for the past 17 years.

I suspect quite a few people use ALAC.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#349

Post by deergomoo »

sbaildon wrote: post #249

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 "…

This bug is so old it predates Apple Music! I was an early iTunes Match subscriber and the same damn thing happened. I believe music is "moved around" on the back end as rights change hands, contracts expire, and new versions of albums become available. Which then just wreaks havoc across your library, as evidently whatever system attempts to keep things in line is pretty awful at it.

All it needs is a toggle for "do not replace tracks". I would much rather see a message saying "this track is no longer available" and then make the decision myself than have to spend time unpicking whatever chaos it caused.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#350

Post by SirensOfTitan »

nxc18 wrote: post #292
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…

For me it is Spotify Connect, and I still can’t believe no one has copied. I’m in the process of getting my speakers set up with airplay, which might be my one way out. It still won’t be as good as Spotify Connect. I just hate that Spotify is deliberately trying to make my Mac and iPhone worse (e.g. Spotify is the only reason Rosetta is running on my M1 Mac) as part of their little war with Apple.

I ended up extracting the binary for the Spotify iOS app and side loading it on my M1 MacBook. It works pretty well, and eliminates need for rosetta.
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