Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#391

Post by ekingr » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

sbaildon wrote: post #381

ekingr wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree so much! I switched to Apple Music 2 years ago when my hard drive failed. At the beginning it was alright, very convenient to have (almost) everything available on hand, in the same app as before. But now I can't stand it anymore. I have so many albums that randomly split all the time, version of tracks that change or become unavailable altogether. I'm moving away from streaming and am working on building bac…

What's your plan for streaming? Funkwhale?

Still not sure.

Indeed I have Funkwhale on the radar, but tbh I don't have a strong use case for streaming at home. Was thinking about putting it on my rPi -- but in the end it's even easier to just stream from my iPhone through Bluetooth (or a good old jack).

My priority is to build a clean library with beets, transcode it in mp3 and feed it to iTunes, to have it on my iPhone & iPod.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#392

Post by yingbo » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

Forbo wrote: post #339

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.

> all benefits as other open source format e.g. FLAC. Except adoption. FLAC is much more widely supported, so why opt for ALAC?

ALAC is open source and you can feel free to contribute to it or "adopt"/use it.Apple has been using ALAC for a long time on difference devices and platform. Moreover, according to Wikipedia, "compared to some other formats, it is not as difficult to decode, making it practical for a limited-power device, such as older iOS devices". "Adoption" is not a reason, from my point of view, ask a company/app abandon an open sourced format to use another one.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#393

Post by lxgr » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

yehaaa wrote: post #62

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…

The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec. Secondly Apple has been using AAC since forever which is a successor to mp3 and an MPEG standard.

Surely it's ALAC + FairPlay DRM though, right? Making the actual lossless codec used a moot point.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#394

Post by CharlesW » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

thrdbndndn wrote: post #254

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…

What you said is totally true but it's not relevant here. Apple already have all the lossless files on their server. Just that before they converted them to lossy format before sending to the user, and now they serve the original. There is no new master / new re-release involved in all these.

> Apple already have all the lossless files on their server. Just that before they converted them to lossy format before sending to the user, and now they serve the original.

Do you happen to have a citation for when this changed? According to the "Apple Digital Masters" Technology Brief[1], the masters delivered to Apple have historically been AAC files.

[1] https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#395

Post by squeaky-clean » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

krrishd wrote: post #351

Someone1234 wrote: post #46

This is included/no additional cost which is fantastic. I do wonder if in the longer term if Apple's Spatial Audio with "dynamic head tracking" isn't the next 3D TVs/3D Content i.e. a gimmick. Taking traditional multi-source audio (Dolby/Atmos/etc) and jamming it into stereo is old tech, it doesn't work particularly well but is cheap to make/consume, thus mostly harmless. The new Spatial Audio is using gyroscopes to…

The fascinating thing about this spatial audio wave to me is that it was basically available almost a decade ago (because "binaural audio" has been available and fairly trivially usable for a while now). I remember one of the first apps I downloaded on my iPod Touch in middle school (~2011) was a "binaural audio" app that catalogued spatial audio experiences (+ voice-acted stuff like getting a haircut, etc).

Binaural audio recordings are usually made with a Binaural microphone that records sound in a similar configuration to how human ears work. Or they're just synthesized directly as a stereo signal (that's usually how those "binaural beats" music is made). They're nothing more than a stereo file, and the audio has just been recorded in a certain way that mimics the human ear and head. This is why the virtual surround sound from binaural recordings sounds so convincing, but only when wearing headphones.

Spatial audio is a more generalized term. Let's say you're filming an action movie and have a scene where a robot comes from foreground-right, kicks a car, and the car flies over the camera and makes a loud crashing sound behind the camera. You can't just stick a binaural microphone on set and record that because it's almost all CGI. There is no actual sound of a robot kicking a car to be recorded. Instead your foley artists and sound design team will record and modify dozens (even hundreds) of sound sources and combine them together in software that supports a sort of virtual 3d environment, and save it in a format capable of representing this (like Dolby Atmos).

You can then take that Dolby Atmos data and in realtime compute how to map your virtual sound-sources onto things like a 64-speaker Dolby Atmos array in an movie theater, or a 12-speaker home theater Dolby Atmos setup, or apply an HRTF to convincingly map that audio to 2 headphones. A Binaural audio signal is restricted to stereo and intended to be placed directly in the ears.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#396

Post by jabroni_salad » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

Less quality is their windows software. I am currently on a 3 month trial with Apple Music. I'm not sure why I was surprised, but it doesn't run very well on either Windows or Android. iTunes... is what it is, and the website version hogs CPU like no other even with the tab in the background. If I'm going to let a subscription service become my music library then I need it to run on anything!

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#397

Post by tyrust » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #276

schmorptron wrote: post #152

Wow, I've been using Apple Music on trial to see how it's different from spotify and with this news + Spotify now selling pseudo-ads in the forms of playlist and recommendation algorithm placements for less artist royalties I'll stay with Apple for sure. One thing that really differentiates it is that the curated playlists seem a lot more cared for than with Spotify. I've found so many of the pre-made playlists that…

>Spotify now selling pseudo-ads in the forms of playlist and recommendation algorithm placements for less artist royalties Hard to take artists demands to be paid better seriously when they keep agreeing to things like this. Honestly they are their own worst enemy at times.

Perhaps the ones making these demands aren't the ones that have these agreements.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#398

Post by squeaky-clean » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

Mandelmus wrote: post #201

Someone1234 wrote: post #46

This is included/no additional cost which is fantastic. I do wonder if in the longer term if Apple's Spatial Audio with "dynamic head tracking" isn't the next 3D TVs/3D Content i.e. a gimmick. Taking traditional multi-source audio (Dolby/Atmos/etc) and jamming it into stereo is old tech, it doesn't work particularly well but is cheap to make/consume, thus mostly harmless. The new Spatial Audio is using gyroscopes to…

This Apple Music “spatial audio” just means Dolby Atmos. It is not the same gyroscope-based spatial audio that they use on Apple TV.

In theory they could apply the gyroscope based movement to Dolby Atmos based music as well. But who wants to turn 90 degrees left and have the songs soundstage not also shift with them?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#399

Post by numpad0 » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #358

numpad0 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A/B test by actually hiring a quartet That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.

This may be true about popular music, because this is how we came to know this style of music - live performances (without proper sound engineering) sound worse. It is completely the opposite for classical music. There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra.

First time I had been to an actual classical concert I thought the walls need more dampening, mics placement is terrible and couple sliders on the right side of equalizer could be turned down a bit.

By the time It was over I completely "got" it though. I was internally complaining that an actual fishing port at 5AM don't look like a Monet copy, not watered down, skewed, or idealized.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#400

Post by BatteryMountain » Mon, May 17, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

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 I can hear the difference. For me, compressed audio sounds like this:

low frequencies: dull, humming noise

mid range: sounds like the sound is coming from a sock

higher frequencies: too squeaky is the best way I can describe it.

I have permanent tinnitus though. The better/higher the sound quality, the less noticeable it is. And of coarse listening to a real instrument a few meters away (that doesn't go through a mic & amplifier) is an absolute treat.