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

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#681

Post by movedx » Tue, May 18, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #676

movedx wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You consume in a slower manner. > To answer your question of how do I curate a library, legally, is just over time. I have a lot of musicians I like, and when I find them, I purchase their music, and I listen to it. I guess I can just start buying their albums today, slowly, but I often found it difficult to even find a vendor of their stuff online. Thanks for the response.

Have your tried Bandcamp, Qobuz, Boomkat, Bleep and others? Personally I buy and find all my music in lossless digital formats. Any release I want to have. Interestingly you may have a harder time finding very popular mainstream music in a lossless format.

> Have your tried Bandcamp, Qobuz, Boomkat, Bleep and others?

I haven't. I'll check them out now :-)

> Interestingly you may have a harder time finding very popular mainstream music in a lossless format.

Oh I don't care about those things, actually. It's more availability and cost.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#682

Post by lloeki » Tue, May 18, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

marcan_42 wrote: post #609

lloeki wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I agree, although arguably the MP3 "core format" has had a number of extensions around so many things that ultimately became de facto standards (vendor extensions if you will). I remember how you could not have precise seeking or current time display with VBR, which now seems to be now largely a solved problem.

> There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support

One of these is LAME adding gapless stuff at least as far back as 2003, so yes it's a workaround to a format limitation, but it's quite an old one, and fairly stable and known well enough that it's been a while since encoders default to encode with gapless metadata.

There's an interesting historical explanation here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2

I do agree though that the easy path out of it is to just stop using MP3, for this reason and a zillion others ;)

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#683

Post by chefandy » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:04 AM UTC

chefandy wrote: post #523

haecceity wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the question is do they enjoy the book with excellent typography because they're told it's excellent or can they perceive the higher excellence and derive enjoyment thereof.

I can speak to this as a graphic designer. In the Battle of Naboo in the Phantom Menace (2001, 115m budget,) you see a CGI battle between a million zillion CGI robots and CGI aliens with CGI force fields, etc. It's a proud display of state-of-the-art CGI capability, circa 2001. To this day, when you watch Jurassic Park (1993, 65m budget,) you're looking at a fucking dinosaur . Great typography is like great special e…

A famous 1932 essay on the matter— The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible by Beatrice Warde: https://veryinteractive.net/content/2-library/52-the-crystal...

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#684

Post by greenmana » Tue, May 18, 2021, 12:28 PM UTC

nxc18 wrote: post #301

greenmana wrote: post #221

These days I tend to navigate more towards services that pay more to the artists for streams. In this I've found Tidal to be a good combo of lossless and master level audio with also a higher amount of money going to the musicians per stream. It actually also has pretty good suggestions and other stuff once you've first used for a little while, which was the biggest reason I've stayed with Spotify til now.

Their tech, at least on iOS, needs investment. I had to drop Tidal after trying for a month. CarPlay was a disaster, it just didn’t work well, very laggy, things didn’t always play, it wasn’t great about handling offline playlists. Separately, they will log you out randomly, locking you out of your offline library. Spotify has never done this to me. I had to buy WiFi on a flight, unnecessarily, to unlock the offline…

That's sucky. My Tidal use is mostly on my desktop computer while I do work and other stuff, so it's mostly painless like that. Spotify also had pretty good remote control features through the phone app, I don't think Tidal does yet.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#685

Post by copperx » Tue, May 18, 2021, 12:31 PM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #645

simias wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter, it's good marketing. It's not rational, but it lets Apple posture as being "high end". The utter majority of people won't be able to tell the difference but then again the utter majority of people won't even try to test it. I know that I personally can't even tell the difference between Spotify's "mid" and "high" quality settings the vast majority of the time even in perfect listening conditions wi…

> but it lets Apple posture as being "high end". That's one way to look at it. Personally I'd say that it stops companies like Tidal (et al) from posturing as being "more high end" based on these dubious and mostly bullshit claims around lossless and high-res audio formats. Hopefully the outcome will be that we'll be hearing fewer bullshit arguments about how "Tidal sounds better than Apple Music". The people who lik…

I hate the idea that everyone is going to be using 10x data needlessly. What's next, uncompressed video?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#686

Post by f1refly » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #644

tachyonbeam wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are downvoting you but you're not wrong. One of the biggest factors behind Apple's success is that they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. They're the Prada of the tech world. I switched from an iPhone to an Android recently and found the quality of the device and software to be just as good if not better, but an Android doesn't say "I'm upper middle class" like an iPhone does. Me, I see spatial audi…

How is Apple a "prada" status symbol? Yes, they're popular, iconic and aspirational, but have you seen the prices and refinement of Samsung phones recently? If Samsung haven't been able to replicate Apple in being iconic and aspirational, that's on them. You can't blame Apple because Samsung aren't also "prada" in your eyes.

The discussion was about android, not about samsung.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#687

Post by spookyuser » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:07 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…

Wow thank you for introducing me to musicleague, I love the idea!

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#688

Post by breakfastduck » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #371

breakfastduck wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

128kbs is absolutely noticeable drop imo. I can't see any reason for 128kbs service unless you're absolutely starved for data. There is no other advantage.

>I can't see any reason for 128kbs A lower price tier? Or even a Freemium model. Considering most of them are already available on Youtube. As strange as this may sound I dont think Streaming is the business model that will save Music industry. And despite the headlines ( whatever MSM likes to print these days ) most artist's real income are from somewhere else.

Streaming definitely wont 'save the industry', it woefully underpays the artists.

You're only making that problem even worse by offering a low quality, even lower price model.

Frankly I can't imagine there would be many artists particularly happy with having huge swathes of people introduced to their music at 128kbs.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#689

Post by breakfastduck » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

realo wrote: post #361

breakfastduck wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure you're saving your ears by doing this compared to say, turning the volume down. You can't 'uncompress' an MP3 back to having the dynamic range it had before.

Well… maybe some cool AI would help here… We already have it for images!

We can take a jpeg and run it back to RAW?

Because I don't think we can.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#690

Post by schmorptron » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #257

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…

Main thing I miss from Spotify is the discover weekly playlist. I started using Apple Music because Spotify’s attempts to ruin podcasts by making them exclusive to their platform irritated me. Discover weekly is a really great thing though and Apple Music’s stuff isn’t as good.

That's fair, same for me. Discover weekly (and to an extent release radar) were some of the best features on Spotify for sure, they had a way higher chance of really hitting good than they have any right to.