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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

#601

Post by joshspankit »

friedegg wrote: post #129
PaulHoule wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Converting files to Ogg Vorbis a long time ago was something I regret. There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder or Apple's AAC encoder (maybe the only quality AAC encoder) but you are guaranteed to have to re-encode if you want to play on your sports watch, in your car, play on your smart speakers, etc.)

I ripped all of my CDs to FLAC, then I was able to convert those to Ogg Vorbis at the time for my portable player. Later I converted the FLACs to mp3s, and used Apple's iTunes Match, so I have access to them on various devices for $25/year.

“Them”. I tried this when it launched, and so many of my unique recordings were clobbered: Artists incorrectly identified, live recordings replaced with studio recordings, etc. I threw the idea out and never looked back.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#602

Post by floatingatoll »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #591
floatingatoll wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, repea…

> There's probably a better way to do this that doesn't trigger a merge conflict Well if you want to try Nix, https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9dba669e8a53f00114b53d... right out of the box :D

That’s what I get for not saying “in Homebrew”!

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#603

Post by Wowfunhappy »

crazygringo wrote: post #595
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (The best way to view 3D movies, funnily enough, is in a virtual theater on the Oculus Quest 2.) I don't deny the drawbacks of stereoscopic 3D—even as a personal 3D fan, I'm not surprised it never caught on—but I don't think a VR headset is the best way to consume stereoscopic content. Because, well, you have to wear a headset! I have a BenQ W1070 projector which supports stereoscopic 3D, and a Valve Index. For act…

Oh sure I wasn't referring to comfort, just to the pure quality of the 3D experience. A VR headset is the only solution I'm aware of that is full-brightness, zero-ghosting.

Ghosting, maybe, although I almost never notice it on my projector.

But, isn't "full brightness" just a function of how bright you make the projector? Which is to say, you could make a projector that's twice as bright as mine (mine isn't amazing, it cost less a a grand) and in 3D it would have the brightness of my 2D setup.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#604

Post by joshspankit »

twobitshifter wrote: post #233
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 tha…

I wish the majority of people knew that “HD” is as meaningless a label as “Digital quality”

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#605

Post by OJFord »

As I understand it, the dream of Dolby Atmos is that the track is encoded in such a way that it perfectly describes the 'surround sound', it's [infinity].[infinity] , in some loose sense; and then receivers down-mix it to whatever flavour of x.y the user happens to have, as in one 5.1 != Another, since layout and distances differ.

Is that right? And/but is it anything like that in practice? Or are studios still mixing for 5.1 and then running some post-process 'Atmos support' that makes the AVR's Atmos light come on but has little 'other' benefit?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#606

Post by joshspankit »

knoebber wrote: post #542
stingraycharles wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah good times, I’m nostalgic about managing my own music collection using directory structures, everything consistent and well-organized. Tagging metadata using musicbrainz, listening with foobar2000. Nowadays I’ve been sucked into the Spotify vacuum because of convenience, but I do miss out on more obscure music. And I have no idea how to find that, except from sites like SoundCloud and mixcloud, but their UX is h…

Bandcamp is great for this. You can buy albums from indie artists and download in your preferred format, DRM free.

Double agree.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#607

Post by marcan_42 »

bscphil wrote: post #561
marcan_42 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates. Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all sample…

> This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates. On the whole your comment is great, but I think this point might be revealing of either your age or the last time your looked at mp3 encoders. LAME has been great for at least a decade now. Other than (possibly) extrem…

LAME is great, and in fact it's better than e.g. the ffmpeg AAC encoder at equal bitrates, which is telling. But the MP3 format has fundamental limitations that no encoder can fix, and Opus is unquestionably better in every way. What I'm saying is I'm pretty sure you can find killer samples for 320k LAME (under very good listening conditions), while that's a lot less likely for something like Opus.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#608

Post by joshspankit »

blackearl wrote: post #513
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 "…

I miss what.cd Despite what anyone thinks about music piracy, what.cd had hands down the best music organization I've ever seen. I wish they had just dropped the torrents and kept the indexing features

The audio world lost big when what.cd went down. Even non-members benefitted because what.cd fed so many people who went on to share the track lists, and albums, and “did you know this artist was in the background of this”, and so on.

They could have open-sourced the whole thing, put a paid API endpoint on in, and kept on.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#609

Post by marcan_42 »

lloeki wrote: post #453
Loughla wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. Oh christ, this is my least favorite thing about newer audio formats. Some of the old albums were meant to be heard in one stretch; there are no gaps between tracks, because you're hearing a story. Then comes mp3 and digital audio, with a second pause between them. It just kills me. I get accused of being a hipster by my fa…

I stopped having this issue for well over a decade. Especially on some albums I enjoy there are tracks which are logically separate (on CD as well as files) yet "play" into one another continuously, so I'd have noticed this as it would produce a weird silence in an otherwise seamless musical transition. It's entirely a player thing to start decoding the next track slightly before the current track ends and continuous…

No, it does. MP3 has an issue with gapless playback. A one second pause is a player thing, but the format itself does not support truly glitchless playback, because it always stores an integer number of audio blocks, and adds padding at the beginning. This is why nobody should ever use MP3 for e.g. sending around clips for video or audio production - quality issues aside, it also screws up the timing and aligning the start of the track.

More modern formats solved this issue by precisely defining the start/end points so decoding can produce an output with precisely the same alignment and number of samples as the input.

There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support into it, but the core format cannot do it.

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