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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

#701

Post by foobarbecue »

kleinsch wrote: post #575
foobarbecue wrote: post #571

I enjoy actual 5.1 music which was briefly a thing in the 200s. There are a few albums recorded this way -- Tipper's Surrounded, Opeth, one or two Mastodon, a Muse album or two. I've seen a lot of BS marketing stuff with stereo + some effects being labelled as 5.1 or 7.1. What is Dolby Atmos? I went to https://www.dolby.com/technologies/dolby-atmos/ but it doesn't really tell you. In my dreams it is music recorded wi…

Here’s how I understand Atmos. A long time ago, surround was based on how the wires were hooked up, so first we had 2 channels, then 2.1, 5.1, etc. So your recording might have a left, right, rear channel, but the channels had to be globally defined and premixed. Your audio file would say “play A out of the speaker, B out the right speaker.” Atmos is redoing that for digital, so you can say that a channel or sound is…

So it's a format that contains as many audio streams as you want, and each stream has an associated 3d position vector?

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#702

Post by tootie »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #679
tootie wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: no. Digital audio can reproduce analog audio flawlessly already. Chris "Monty" Montgomery has some excellent videos on the topic that I was coincidentally listening to just this morning. This Verge article sums it up and links to his really excellent talks. https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/6/9680140/chris-montgomery-...

The point was not "flawlessly" but lossless.

Lossy and lossless has to do with the encoding not the signal processing. I'm just saying it is entirely possible to replicate an analog signal with a digital intermediary. Losslessness depends on the software.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#703

Post by astrange »

jancsika wrote: post #696
astrange wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beatles albums have a lot of hard pans on them as I recall.

Which song on which album? I'm asking because I literally want to listen to it in a mono context and experience what bad things happen as a result.

I was going to say Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - title track and Within You Without You. But it turns out they want you to listen in mono anyway!

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/inside-track-sgt-pep...

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#704

Post by nathancoleman »

zubspace wrote: post #407
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…

This musicleague website is probably the worst landing page I've ever seen. What the heck is it? And why should I log in? What company is behind it? What has it to do with Spotify? What's their target audience? Did they intentionally remove all information on that page? Is it an app for a smart phone? Or maybe I'm just too old..

Creator here! I’ve heard this feedback a few times recently, and a couple of people here even reached out! A proper landing page is definitely at the top of my To Do list. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts here!

It’s only a web app today, but a mobile app is in the works as I have time outside of the day job.

The site has never been marketed, and there’s never been a company behind it - just me. I’m in the awkward phase of taking something I built on the weekend for close friends who all knew exactly what it was/how it worked and evolving it to support all of the people who have stumbled across it. Super excited to keep improving it!

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#705

Post by simondotau »

copperx wrote: post #685
simondotau wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I disagree with your flat assertion of 10x.

The vast majority of Apple Music lossless audio will be CD-quality ALAC which has a variable bitrate generally between 2x and 4x that of 256kbps AAC. A small subset of music available to stream will also be "high res" with bitrates in the realm of 5x to 10x.

It also won't be "everyone" using this but rather only a small percentage of people—and within that subset, many will only choose it for a limited subset of music and in a limited subset of listening contexts. It wouldn't surprise me if lossless was chosen by fewer than 1% of consumers.

Therefore in aggregate, the increase is going to be somewhere closer to 1.1x, not 10x.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#706

Post by simondotau »

f1refly wrote: post #686
simondotau wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was responding to this assertion: "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."

This was referring to brand perceptions, not the Android or iOS software platforms.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#707

Post by rapjr9 »

jolux wrote: post #278
unfamiliar wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My buddy can do it. I didn’t believe him at first but he scored better than me, consistently. We’re both musicians but he’s more into lossless audiophile stuff. We tested it out in our college dorm freshman year. Speakers were the built in ones on my MacBook Pro. I will say that the difference is extremely minor and he has said he only cares about lossless for the sake of having original media in high quality, so he…

I think this is what confuses many people when they do their own tests, they don't know what to listen for and expect a more general sound quality difference over all parts of the recordings. The differences are actually in particular kinds of sounds, like high hats or piano, and only at specific moments, and only in specific music. For music that is all distortion all the time likely no one can tell the difference. Some people are irked at the slight changes in sound at specific moments compared to listening to CD's or vinyl, some don't even notice it because it is brief or those instruments/moments are not present in a particular recording.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#708

Post by tobyhinloopen »

salamandersauce wrote: post #57
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #11

This is honestly quite exciting and I’m actually tempted to use get Apple Music to try this. However, it’s not really clear to me how I can play these tracks. Can I use my existing Dolby Atmos setup? If so, what kind of hardware do I need to connect? Can I use a HDMI dongle for my iPad, for example, to connect it to my receiver? Or is this only an Apple-specific thing that only works on Apple speakers. I’m afraid I a…

I would imagine at the very least an Apple TV 4K hooked up to your receiver would work. The Apple TV 4K does support Dolby Atmos and I can't imagine they wouldn't update it to support this. All they say so far is that you need Atmos compatible stuff for it to work.

A friend contacted Apple and got a reply to confirm Atmos would work over Apple TV (if your amp supports it obviously)

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#710

Post by websites420 »

capableweb wrote: post #678
websites420 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Instead of building hardware that can efficiently play FLAC, they created their own format in order to promote harder lock in to their walled garden. I don't follow how ALAC promotes a harder lock into their walled garden. If you have a file in ALAC (not a streaming instance, an actual file), it can be converted losslessly to FLAC. Moreover, ALAC has been open source for almost 10 years. Android plays it fine, as do…

Let's say you have two file formats. One is a open standard, the other one is not (but has it's specifications published, that's something at least). Both formats have the same purpose and basically works the same way. One has been around for almost 20 years, the other for around 9 years (but specification not open until 2 years after release). Instead of going for the one with the open standard, that does the same t…

No, I don’t see anything bad about this, because I don’t see how a user misses out.

What lock-in does ALAC afford Apple? If Apple took FLAC and tweaked it a bit to make it work with their streaming better, would you have a similar objection? The outcome is the same.

It might be the case (I’m not sure) that Apple invented ALAC because they thought they could shape the future of lossless audio to their advantage, and get some royalties for the format. But that certainly hasn’t happened, so I’m just really not sure what there is to lament here outside the ideological adherence to open standards.

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