> 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, as the inaudible loss of quality with minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) is audible when the sound is sped up or slowed down.
But, and this the article does not mention, is not what Apple Music wants you to do. The formats will be proprietary with DRM.
I prefer FLAC/OggVorbis/etc when it comes to music. But then I like to be able to mix/remix.
> 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".
Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones than a compressed version, even 320kbps MP3. A poorly mastered track will be much harder (if not outright impossible) to tell the difference on.
> 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 silent listening environment – is mastered with more dynamic range. The mainstream release of the same music, on the other hand, often features a different mastering with levels pushed up, because they assume that ordinary people will be listening to music in noisy environments, like through earbuds in the metro. This is often a problem for re-releases of 1960s recordings of jazz where the producer and engineer really exploited dynamic range, but that is lost in the most recent of the digital-era re-releases.
(Another reason to prefer SACDs and Blu-ray releases of recordings is for the possibility of 5.0 surround sound, because of course CD and mainstream downloads or streaming are limited to mono or stereo only.)
Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies.
Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over.
Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers.
If your friend is naive and easily fooled, do an A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating with the speakers.
There are a thousand compromises between the source of music and your ear. What is worth paying for is a recording where those compromises were made well. The compression level is a very small part of the picture.
Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference.
I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers.
It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played.
This is pretty old hat now. IRCAM was experimenting with spatialized sound on a stereo medium already back in the 1990s. The software they came up with was used e.g. for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons where sound is moved around the hall.
Unless you have bad hearing everyone would be able to hear the difference on speakers and live unless live is defined as someone playing far away on a scene or something, no matter how expensive equipment you have. It is impossible to have it sound like musicians playing in the same room. To even come close you would need several speakers per instrument playing in multiple directions and some playing sounds of the people moving, breathing and talking too. Not even a simple snare drum being hit at intervals can be reproduced by a normal stereo setup to sound as if it were in the same room unless it's at distance. Remember, we play music at home so the definition should be an orchestra two to three meters away, not an orchestra ten to twenty meters away up at a scene.
Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.
> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers.
When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I did this with an acoustic guitar CD.
The amount of detail I could hear, and by detail I mean "close my eyes and hear every details of the musican's fingers moving across the strings" detail, was incredible.
That is also the day that I learned MP3 encoders of the time (~8 years ago) still had bad encoding artifacts even at 256kbps.
After hearing enough clicks and pops, I ended up having to re-rip my CDs as FLAC, or in some cases buy the CDs so I could rip them.
Now days encoders are a LOT better. You don't get clicks and hisses except at 128kbps.
Also 90% of my listening is done through a wireless headset (...) through spotify (...) so quality has taken a serious nose dive anyway.
That said if I want to listen to music as an all immersive activity, yeah, lossless through high end speakers. But I do that maybe once every other month for half an hour.
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.
>There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra.
That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why?
What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment?
If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the problem, it's no longer something that can be measured and objectivized.
And that's entirely fine, but I think there's a trend among some people (and especially the type of people who frequent this forum) that deem that if a feeling or emotion can't be objectivized then it's effectively worthless or irrational or something like that, so you see people grasping at straws to justify their emotions with a pseudo-scientific explanation. I find that frankly sad and quite toxic in a way.
Music is art, the enjoyment we derive from it can't be measured in kilobits per second. That doesn't mean that we need to make up pseudo-facts about acoustics to justify our preferences.
I also thought the same, then I went to listen some orchestral performance at the Rome Auditorium.
During an interval I was sitting in a shitty corner up on some balcony, pretty far; but I could hear the voice and discern the words of a girl chatting down in the platea next to an entrance.
A single mouth, chatting, among hundreds other voices.
During the concert you could hear the individual performers’ instruments, the strings rubbing, the valves clicking. I was blown away
A critical factor in this experience was the actual room. Anyone dealing with audio and hifi will confirm how much great acoustics depend on a well treated room.
While most of us can't live in such a purpose-optimized room I think OP's point was that a bunch of high quality speakers in that very same auditorium might have yielded very similar results to your experience.
> That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why?
Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile.
The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.
> but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.
Yes, but we're talking about 5 digit and up audio equipment and listening to the top operas of the world, which definitely do have guys that know how to record. Your 10$ (or 250$) headphones combined with a CD from a smaller producer will not get you all the way there, I agree, but once you're in the insane high-price audiophile world, this becomes possible.
To start replicating the sound of an orchestra, you'll at a minimum need one speaker at each location where a player is, playing a single channel (the instrument).
But even this is simplifying things, because each instrument has a different body shape, different sound projection, which would need to be replicated by specialized speakers. Also, the room has an important effect on how the sound waves travel and hit you from different directions. At the end it is probably cheaper and easier to pay a ticket to have this live experience.
Of course not, what you need is model the way your ear handles sound coming from various locations then model this and reproduce it. It's like VR, but for your ears. That's how ASMR effectively works. If you want full immersion you can add head tracking so that the sound "rotates" around you when you move your head. I know that Apple offers that with their latest headphones.
Admittedly in order to do this you need to have post-processing specific for every person since we don't process sound exactly the same depending on our physiology. I know that Sony attempted something like that with its "3D audio". I think it's a bit of a gimmick myself, but it's technically doable.
What if you only want to replicate the sound of an orchestra as heard by an observer at a specified point? Why wouldn't two microphones be sufficient? That's how it's perceived, after all.
You can get really nice sound that way, but to get the full effect you need to take into account the shape of the head and ears of the listener. After all, these are important factors that help us place sound in space.
Your ears are highly directional devices and an orchestra in a concert hall creates a highly complex soundscape that is impossible to replicate with 2 channels. Location awareness (i.e. 2 mics where your ears are) is just a small part of the problem.
So it sounds like the experience can be fully captured with two microphones mounted in the ears of an acoustic dummy head, as long as you're willing to accept a single position and orientation for the observer. Personally, that would be more than good enough fidelity.
I suppose then you would need to have the transfer function of that specific observer's head and ears at that specific point. Perhaps some time in the future there will be personalization of the transfer function so that you can hear the sounds as you would hear it at that spot.
> What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment?
An orchestra is a large number of instruments spread across a wide stage. Each of those instruments is its own sound source. The audio cortex in the brain is highly tuned to understand things like the 3D location of sounds from cues generated by factors like the individual shape of our ears and how sounds bounce around and down into the ear canal.
Now I'm sure you'd agree that sitting in front of two speakers X metres apart, or with headphones on, no matter how good those speakers / headphones are is a different set of sound waves.
Some people are absolutely able to determine the difference between those sound sources. They're likely to have listened to a lot of music. I think these discussions get derailed by the blanket "people can" or "people can't" statements rather than thinking about who might be able to make those distinctions. It might be that the majority of people can't make that distinction. But that doesn't mean that no-one can.
It's like folks are talking past each other here. There appear to be a substantial number of (I assume younger)posters that have never been to something like a symphony orchestra and don't see the point when they can geek out with FLAC at home. Maybe the orchestras should advertise "Come see our array of 120 separate high end speakers" and the kidz would respond.
> What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears
tongue in cheek answer: nothing. It's your ears that are special.
Less tongue in cheek, while we have got pretty good at making microphones, they don't behave anything like human audio system; this makes it really difficult to reproduce what we experience when generated a different way (e.g. multichannel playback).
There is nothing "special" about classical music here either, it's just got a lot of complexity (from multiple instruments, and room dynamics) and dynamic range.
I see your point: if we could a) design microphones that capture everything going by them in a neutral way and b) design speakers that precisely reproduce everything they are sent in a neutral way, and c) set up a room to reproduce things in a neutral way for your particular position ... then this would work. We can't actually do any of those things.
If you've never heard an orchestra in an auditorium with proper sound design you're in for a treat. Two or four speakers are simply a poor alternative to dozens of live performers around you.
Maybe if you move your head just a little bit with a live orchestra, the change is different from what happens with a few speakers (and often in a different room)
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.
I have been surprised in both directions where what I thought was live music was prerecorded and what I thought was prerecorded turned out to be live music. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, audio equipment has gotten really good and audio standards are based around what people notice.
The more realistic scenario where it might actually make a difference is DJs playing on huge high-end club soundsystems where compression artefacts might not only effect what you can hear, but the reverberations you can physically feel, and where there might be post-processing effects applied to the source material that show up the compression artifacts.
Meanwhile I'm listening the output of an amplifier playing a distorted guitar. I might listen to an acoustic guitar, and there might be a small horn section. Of course there's going to be drums. So it's super-simple to tell if it's live or a recording - the volume levels are going to be insanely different!
> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet.
To be fair to the audio system, a significant reason why they'd sound different is because of room acoustics—and we rarely listen to string quartets playing in residential living rooms.
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.
I might be misunderstanding, but I think that PDF is about how to master your music such that it will sound good after they convert it to AAC. It doesn't actually speak to the audio that's sent to them.
Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Likely earlier, that's just when the code got moved into source control. That actually predates the copyright on that PDF.
In general, of the maybe 150-odd DSPs we deliver to, as far as I know all but a handful have us deliver PCM. The remainder have us delivering flac.
> Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018.
Cool, I take your word for it. Thanks!
The referenced document only talks about AAC masters, and the tools at https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/ only create AAC masters. The simplest explanation is that the public materials and tools are just sadly out of date.
I'm pretty sure nucleardog is correct and that Apple wants 24/96KHz minimum sent to them; the PDF you linked to actually says that under "Best Practices" -- "To take best advantage of our latest encoders, use only 24-bit sources and send us the highest-resolution master file possible, appropriate to the medium and the project." Then Apple encodes their AACs using the tools and methods described in that document. If I understand it correctly, they're basically trying to ensure that the downsampling from 24/96 to 16/44 preserves as much information as possible. (Does it really make a difference? No idea. But it does mean that Apple has a whole lot of music they can re-encode at varying quality levels.)
It's odd because I've read that before and made an assumption that it was talking about AAC mastering, but it only implies that. There's nothing that comes out and says what they want! There are some parts where they suggest higher fidelity sources, but mostly it comes down to:
Apple Digital Masters Droplet
You can use the Apple Digital Masters Droplet to automate the creation of 256 kbps
AAC encodes.
There isn't actually anything about what you're supposed to send them, only the recommendation to use their tooling which seems geared to produce 256k AAC files.
Note that all entries that have the format Vinyl on that site can be ignored, as the dynamic range calculations don't work well on audio recorded from vinyl records.
I agree. For me the limiting factor is not necessarily whether it is poodles high quality encoded or lossless. For "normal" music the bottleneck is often the recording. With good headphones it is easy to differantiate good from not so good recordings. I
For me a lot of recordings on Tidal/qobuz did not sound better than HQ on Spotify
> I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests.
I, too, run high-end gear and cannot.
The problem scope isn't simply reproduction accuracy, it is also one of taste: Different compression can elevate/alter parts of the sound, and your opinion may not lean to the highest bit rate but rather some other coloring of the music.
The fact you've run this test "repeatedly" actually hurts your argument, since you may just be learning what to expect in your environment. The crux of the article/discussion is that people cannot blindly pick the highest quality, which they cannot (since the different colorings of the music are subjective anyway).
This is crux to the argument. If you know what to listen for, you can pick out the "bad bits", since you know that is where the issue lies. Once you know how to identify bad bits, then you'll be able to "hear" compression artefacts because you'll be primed for them.
In A/B tests this is true, I _can_ reliably (not 100%, but way better than random) tell you which of A/B is compressed, and I can normally do this on somewhat crappy headphones, since I _know_ where to listen to pick out the compression. And this despite being partly deaf.
However, if I am just listening to music I never notice these artefacts, since when listening to music, I'm not trying to determine which A/B stream is wrong. Most of the time, the music is just playing in the background anyway.
Problem is, sometimes when you learn how to spot a deficiency, you can't unlearn it and stop spotting it. It's like with kerning[0] or image compression artifacts. Everyone has a different level, and I haven't measured mine, but even when casually listening to music - including music from bad speakers in a waiting room somewhere - I can identify too badly compressed music and get immediately annoyed by it.
Studies have shown that well-compressed lossy audio is nearly indistinguishable from the originals. This is certainly true for me. I can sometimes pick out the compressed version if I know the track well and can look for specific details, but generally I'm absolutely not consciously aware of any compression artifacts.
Similarly, I doubt most people could pick out small problems with kerning and other typographic issues.
And yet...
I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences. I believe there may be parallels with lossy vs. lossless compression when it comes to music, and with many other experiences as well -- you may not be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with cheap butter and grass-fed butter in an A/B test, but might you enjoy one cookie more than the other anyway?
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.
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 effects in a movie (most of the time,)— the viewer shouldn't realize it's there. "Good typography is invisible" is the most commonly repeated maxim for typographers. Typography is good if it's readable, legible, all elements on the page serve their purpose without needing to be labelled or puzzled over, and the most noticeable thing on the page is the information being conveyed. (Postmodernism challenged this in some interesting ways but for most practical purposes, this still holds true.) A designer might notice the typeface choice, paper choice, tracking, leading, margins, kerning, paragraph 'rag,' line length/column width element hierarchy and placement. The user probably won't notice the greater reading speed, lessened eye fatigue, fewer incidents of losing their place, easier scanning for pertinent bits, and things like that. But it will certainly be there.
I remember the first time I listened to a perfect-condition vinyl of something that I had always only streamed— I was immediately struck by how much more spatially-open it was. I imagine that was pretty deliberately done by the producer and with the necessary high-end loss in lossily compressed music, it just doesn't make it through. Not sure if I would still be able to tell as much of a difference in my 40s as I did in my early 30s, but I think most people would be subtly more engrossed in the music, even if not consciously. That was also sitting at home directly in front of my modest but competent stereo. The real question is context. Will the listening devices convey those subtleties? I know a lot of people are using streaming services as sources for home audio these days, so maybe it would to them? Certainly wouldn't to me as I was listening to music while riding the subway. I might enjoy having it available for a nice sit-down critical listening session.
Great question. There's no way to know outside of big randomized trials but I'd bet thousands of dollars it's the latter. (edit: surely this has been studied, right?)
Though, I'm certain it would be less "perceiving excellence" like a connoisseur, and more like reaping the practical benefits of solid typography.
While there's certainly a lot of showy typography in the world, the sort found in the body copy of books is generally focused on readability, in other words, letting the eye/brain more easily recognize letters and words. Do we enjoy a book more when our eyes and brains aren't overtaxed? It's hard to imagine otherwise -- who enjoys eye strain?
I'm less sure of it but I suspect this is true for lossy vs. lossless music as well. For example, one telltale sign of badly compressed music is when the percussion sounds more like blasts of white noise than the actual instruments -- these sharp transients are hard to losslessly compress efficiently. (It's somewhat similar to how the sharp edges of text and line art are not handled well by some lossy image formats like JPEG)
Is a drum that actually sounds like a drum going to be more pleasing to the ear than something garbled and white-noisy, even if nobody tells you anything? Generally yes, I am fairly sure.
I'd say: before being aware of how typography should look, the main difference is that reading a badly-set book will feel tiring for some reason that's hard to pin, but it's definitely not content. After being made aware, it's just annoying - if you can name the thing that's wrong, you recognize it's wrong.
> Similarly, I doubt most people could pick out small problems with kerning and other typographic issues.
The XKCD comic I linked makes an important point though: someone else pointing out the issues to you can make all the difference. At least with my experience, it literally took that comic for my brain to suddenly start recognizing kerning as a concept, and subsequently see issues with it everywhere.
> I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences.
That I agree with, and I think in those cases, giving someone even the most basic framework to understand what is "good" and what is "bad" is enough to make them much more aware of the issues in the works they're enjoying.
Why does any of this matter? The point of a blind ABX test (and the whole question) is to see whether you can tell the difference between two formats. If you can, you can. Personally, I stop being able to tell somewhere around 200 kbit MP3s (with cheap equipment), anything above that is wasted space.
You can run the tests as much as you want, if the hypothesis is that "people can't tell the difference between lossless and 320 kbit MP3", even one person demonstrating that they can, disproves the entire hypothesis.
I did a blind test with a friend once, 192/320/lossless, and we both could definitely hear which file was 192 - but not which was 320/lossless.
Most of the compression in 320 mp3s is also in areas humans can't hear. I once created a 320 mp3 with a 16kHz cutoff instead of the 20kHz lame uses by default, and to me there was no audible difference - even inverting one and listening to the difference didn't produce anything audible (to me).
Of course nobody uses mp3 anymore, not even iTunes, they encode as 256 aac, which is a far superior codec and near lossless. I doubt anybody can hear the difference between the lossless file and the iTunes file.
Lossless, and possibly upsampling before editing, but high end gear probably does that by default.
As for bitrate compression, although I have a good musical ear, I can't find any appreciable difference from a high bitrate (320) mp3 and the corresponding lossless track, so no problems using mp3s to listen to music.
I also managed to resample my entire portable playlist (yeah, making mp3s out of mp3s, I know in some circles I could be killed just for thinking about that:*) to overcome that dreadful loudness craze that makes pretty much every track produced in the last 20-25 years destroy your ears if you happen to listen to it just after something 10 years older.
Unfortunately all methods to level the tracks (mp3gain, replaygain etc.) don't work properly because they should analyze all tracks dynamic content, not just the average/maximum level, then first adjust their dynamics and later normalize their level. In other words, level compression should be applied more to softer tracks and not the other way around.
So I faked a solution to the problem by reconverting my playlist after applying compression to an extremely low threshold, making clear to myself that none of those tracks would ever leave my player. Some sound really horrible, but I spared my ears.
As far as I know, mp3 frames have a "volume" field, which is what mp3gain changes to losslessly change the volume of the entire track. Could you not take advantage of that too?
The problem is the huge difference in dynamics between "old" and "new" recordings (that is, not just their maximum level) which makes really hard if not impossible to have more tracks sounding near the same level.
"You can't 'uncompress' an MP3 back to having the dynamic range it had before."
True. In fact I would rather compress old music to bring it to the same dynamics of the new one, then and only then normalize everything. I know it's almost a crime; I did it just on my player and would never give these tracks to anyone.
Having lossless copies is still useful for storage and later transcoding. Even if you can't hear a difference between a 192kbit/s MP3 and a higher bitrate lossless file, you might be able to hear one after reencoding the MP3 using another lossy format.
Considering the proliferation of music remixing social media services (i.e. Tiktok) and the cheap price of storage, maybe even casual users can benefit from lossless these days.
I think the Key point would be, could you hear any difference in those test?
If you could, then yes there is a quality differential, rather you got it right or wrong may be subject to taste. But at least we established there are differences.
But when we say 128Kbps are sort of CD Quality or CD being no-difference to 320Kbps mp3, they generally refers to vast majority of consumers, not audio experts. I think most consumers could tell the difference between 256kbps AAC and 128Kbps MP3. But beyond that it sort of goes into consumer dont give a damn territory. Although most Pros would want the highest quality possible and there are no reason why we cant deliver lossless with today's infrastructure.
I am wondering if there is a market for an even cheaper Music Streaming Services that target lower quality, 128Kbps music.
I guess the question then is whether there's a market for 48kbps opus music. But that'd be assuming that a big part of the costs are bandwidth. I'd bet that's not the case.
Also imagine how little traction you'd get once people associate your brand with poor music quality. I don't think you can compete by being 2€/month cheaper.
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.
MP3 compression is not the same thing has compression the audio effect. Compressed music in the effect sense can be enjoyable and is a matter of taste, but hearable MP3 compression artifacts is nearly always crap.
Been out of high end audio for few years, trying this test for past 30 minutes, and can't seem to get past 2/6 with wireless or wired or dynamic or BA or through proper amps or out of a laptop jack. Constantly falling into 320k. Maybe source isn't great in the first place, equalizer slightly suppressing low-mid and noise at the high is doing it.
I use to be a sound engineer. Those "test" usually with gear they owned and you can of course tell the difference with gear you are use to. Most gear has anything but clarity. Most people will dislike clear sound.
The POINT is blind test 128 MP3 and lossless. Still the vast majority of people don't have the equipment to hear any difference.
The Second POINT is most people prefer to have boomy colored sound and again that ruins the need for lossless. This is why people prefer old vinyl records. It compresses the sound and makes it sound better in most people's opinion. If people would listen to 80s tapes I bet they would love that sound also.
The Third POINT music is heard with background noise all the time. No way while listening to music people could tell the difference and those that can it would require great concentration. There is a limited return of investment for most people.
Personally I own a DAC and a preamp and have my hundreds of dollars headphones and my Genlec speakers that cost thousands of dollars. I hear a SLIGHT difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC and that is 100% concentration and I can hear a difference in only certain types of music. Classical Jazz and Classical music. I can't tell with pop and electronic music which is what most people listen to.
> 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 either of us have access to... but if I did have high end gear I could tell for sure!"
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 can make compressed versions in whatever format he wants without losing quality. He rarely actually listens to lossless audio. What he recognized was minor clipping on some high-hat hits, and after he pointed it out I could notice it too if I really tried.
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.
Yeah, it's not a general loss of quality. He actually showed me a really cool YouTube video that explained what is lost with compression, where the person making the video played the same passage of a song compressed and uncompressed, and then showed visually the parts of the waveform that were clipped, and then played the clipped parts isolated. It was a lot of high-pitched, tinny noise, presumably from the upper end of the high hat cymbals and stuff. Wish I still had it handy.
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.
Factors:
- Quality of audio equipment
- The experience of the listener
- The nature of the audio
It’s quite obvious that the average listener listening to a 128kbps podcast stream is not the issue here. Nor is the average listener listening to a 320kbps stream of a loud, noisy pop/rock album.
But there are certain types of music where it’s much more apparent. I have a trained ear and so I can’t speak for everyone. There are certain types of music where I can’t tell the difference. But some classical piano albums on Spotify sound terrible to me. The artifacts of the conpression are more obvious on sensitive, detailed music.
All this to say that a random seection of people failing an online test to some random audio isn’t a comprehensive answer to this question.
If you're interested, check out the listening tests section at https://hydrogenaud.io where experienced testers contribute results to devs trying to improve various lossy codecs.
It often depends on the source material -- some sounds are harder for some algorithms to encode, leading to increased bitrate if the codec supports VBR, or perhaps artifacts of not, or if there's insufficient bitstream available.
Unsurprisingly the newer codecs usually manage to sound better than MP3 at significantly lower bitrates. Remember the only point in lossy encoding is to save space / bandwidth -- it's literaly why MP3 et al were invented.
Not only that, biology is also against them. Somewhere between 25-30 years of age, your hearing already dips <17KHz. Where does lossy do the vast amount of its information discarding? >17KHz.
I am almost 40 and can easily hear pure ones over 17khz but can't differentiate pure noise with or without anything above 13khz.
Right around 18.5khz there's a sharp falloff on pure tones no matter how much I pump the volume. I use a loudness meter that shows me the freq spectrum to confirm that my speakers and headphones are producing a pure constant tone.
High hats tend to fall around 16khz and I have been able to differentiate on audio tests just by listening to high hats but that has more to do with how aggressive the codec is and not necessarily my hearing capability. I enjoy piano music and using the Apple afconvert tool I've been able to get piano tracks down to under 100kbps and they sound fine to me which is pretty amazing.
I cannot use some of the more popular Berydynamic headphones because they sound too trebly and some pop songs are physically painful for me to listen to (eg the marimbas at the start of Ed Sheeran's Shape of You are like ear daggers on the 880 headphone and unlistenable on the 990's). I wonder if some of that brand's popularity comes from older ladies/gentlement being able to hear treble in the music that they otherwise wouldn't hear at all.
Beyerdynamic headphones have a lot of fake detail (actually sibilence) that comes from echoes at high frequencies as well as their treble tuning. It makes songs mastered for radio sound more detailed in the same way a sharpness filter would work on images.
I can't tell you anything except that you have exceptional frequency reach for your age. ISO has actually standardized age-related hearing loss (yes, really), and they point to the same 17KHz point for even young adults.
It actually makes me quite envious of you. I have sensitive ears - I can pick up very faint electrical circuitry sounds in screens or the delivery driver scootering into the beginning of our street despite our windows being closed, but I'd happily trade that away for higher frequency range.
Ha! I literally just sat at my PC and saw your response at 3m old. Yea I've noticed I tend to test pretty well on all the official charts but really can't hear a difference in a lot of "audiophile" stuff people claim night/day differences. I had a beat up, 10+ year old pair of sennheizer hd600's that I never got tired of listening to. I finally had them refurbished and they don't sound as "easy" to listen to.
One thing is I suffer from tinnitus or something because at night I am always aware of a constant noise or "roar" in my hearing as well as my visual noise in my eyesight. I have pretty terrible eyesight so my hearing circuitry may have just amped the volume a bit to compensate (like upping iso on a camera).
In both our cases I wonder how much of this is just our brains have learned to pick things out of the signals are ears give vs our ears actually being more/less capable than other people. I think my brain has just had a lot of practice. I've always loved music, practiced classical piano hours a day when I was younger, and cut my teeth programming learning DSP algos for audio processing. I recently did a hobby project involving reproducing NES music from ROMs and that involved just listening to raw square/triangle waves and literally just following intuition to get everything to sound right. I'm willing to bet my case is one more of training than raw ability.
> I tend to test pretty well on all the official charts but really can't hear a difference in a lot of "audiophile" stuff people claim night/day differences.
Part of that is also your brain. Master sommeliers can tell you which vineyard the grapes in a wine came from, sometimes even which side of the vineyard. Yet give those sommeliers a white wine with red coloring mixed in, and they won't immediately notice.
I've actually met one other person that said what you say, if they really try they can hear a minute difference with cymbals and hi-hats in regards to lossless vs high bitrate lossy, but they also said they had to strainingly focus on the listening and they would never listen nor enjoy music that way.
> In both our cases I wonder how much of this is just our brains have learned to pick things out of the signals are ears give vs our ears actually being more/less capable than other people
A little bit of both, I think. Your ears are naturally more sensitive, so you put the volume on your speakers a lot lower, which teaches your brain to pick up low volume stuff better. I'm always worried the downstairs appartement can hear my 'loud' TV at night, but they've told me they can't hear a thing.
I highly suggest that people check out/try out "ABX comparator" plugin for Foobar2000 player. You give it two files (say a 128kbps mp3 version and a lossless flac verison) and it runs you through a double blind test of the two versions, quizzing you along the way. It's not just "listen to A" "listen to B", it gives you lots of options to listen to them and compare them in different ways, including obfuscating what track is A and what track is B.
If you think you can really hear fine differences in audio, it can be very eye opening (ear opening?).
There is also the theoretical case of double lossy encoding, e.g with Bluetooth headsets.
Something not perceivable when listening to AAC decoding directly punched into a wired headset vs reencoding for BT transport which could transform previously unhearable compression artifacts into the perceivable range (think editing a jpeg and resaving as jpeg often produces artifacts)
I have not seen any tests for that.
(Of course if the device is able to push the AAC stream to the headset this does not happen. This kind of thing is quite opaque and hard to get info about as to which hardware or combination of hardware would support that)
> So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones
I'm quite convinced that a good part of vinyl being reputably better comes from that, especially with the virtuous loop of audiophiles being the main audience for modern vinyl, which calls for good mastering.
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 samples. So you will always be able to find corner cases where an encoder or format does worse and results in more audible artifacts; some of these might be encoder bugs, some might not. Therefore, it is fair to say that you might not want to rely on lossy compression for archival. But it is perfectly reasonable to use it to put music on devices to actually listen to.
You say good mastering makes it easier to notice encoding artifacts, but actually, bad mastering can do that too. Over-compressed stuff (in dynamic range) with inter-sample peaks above 0dB can clip and distort after getting run through a lossy codec.
As for lossless formats, though, anything above 48kHz 16 bits is complete nonsense for final delivery to consumers. All the "high resolution" stuff with higher sample rates and bit depths is just marketing bullshit, and this has been repeatedly demonstrated in trials (the well-designed ones anyway; there are plenty of terrible ones - no, comparing the 96kHz download to the 48kHz download of a song is not how you test this properly).
Bit depths above 16 are useful during production (because quantization noise accumulates and is boosted by things like dynamic range compression); in practice you want to record at 24 bits for headroom reasons, and process in 32-bit float because there's no reason not to with modern computers (and many practical advantages, e.g. ~infinite dynamic range). Sample rates above 48kHz are less so; the main reason to use them is to avoid aliasing artifacts, but it is usually much more effective to do that with well-designed DSP algorithms that include internal oversampling, as opposed to just doing everything at a higher sample rate. Unless you're doing extreme pitch shifting; then higher sample rates may make sense.
Videos everyone interested in audio production should watch:
The little tidbit at the end of the second video about how 48kHz is, in some respects, twice as good as 44.1kHz, is quite neat and not something I'd realized before.
> "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."
I'll add to this that "high bitrate" for Opus can reasonably be considered as 128kbps or above, generally 160 or 192kbps are comfortably beyond what is needed to achieve audible transparency.
For anyone who's used to MP3 and just doing everything at -V0 or 320kbps, it's extremely impressive to hear how good Opus is, and how low bit rates you can get away with. Even at 24kbps it's serviceable for music, it sounds no worse than a slightly worn cassette tape.
It's a seriously impressive codec, both for speech and musical content.
> 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.
This is such a key point: MP3 has known weaknesses with certain common sound profiles (e.g. sharp transitions such as a cymbal or snare drum) which aren't really fixable. For me the threshold was AAC 256kpbs where I stopped noticing artifacting.
> 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) extremely rare killer samples, you're unlikely to be able to ABX a LAME encoded track at 256 Kbps. I certainly can't, and I have pretty decent gear and have been listening to (and working on) music for a very long time.
Back in the 90s, all mp3 encoders were shit. Xiph's Monty, in the post you link, mentions being able to distinguish between them using only their results as a party trick. Even in the early 2000s you needed 256-320 Kbps to have a shot at transparency. But now, most music is transparent at `lame -V2` settings, which gives approximately 192 Kbps results. I can still ABX a very small number of songs (last I tested), but even these go away by `lame -V0`, which is the highest quality VBR mode. HydrogenAudio, a trustworthy source as far as "audiophile" claims go, says that anything from `-V0 to -V3` should be transparent under most conditions. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php/LAME
AAC and Vorbis are certainly better codecs, achieving transparency most of the time at closer to 160 Kbps. Opus is even better. I've never been able to ABX a 128 Kbps track, and music sounds great even at 96 Kbps (for stereo!). There are supposed to be killer samples for all four, forcing them to require a higher bitrate to achieve transparency, but interest in finding these seems to have dropped.
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.
Yeah, 96kHz/24bit is only really useful for production, since it makes it more foolproof and harder to mess up your recording.
But storing music over 48kHz and 16bit for comsumption is really just waste of storage space and pure snake oil. 16 bit give a dynamic range of 96dB and I'm not aware of any recording outside of experiments that take advantage of it. Even the most expensive speaker / headphones will distort terribly if you play them on the loudness level where this dynamic range would matter...
And most "high quality" recordings with a high frequency range (96kHz+) only really add ultrasonic sound and mostly noise artefacts that don't correlate to the music recorded (and that no speaker / headphones can even reasonably, without high distortions, reproduce, if they even pass the LPF of the reproduction chain).
So yeah, I also think that 48/16 is all we need for optimal consumption. If the format is lossless, it's also nice for archival reasons.
You may find this interesting. The author argues against 96khz+ sample rates, but pegs the optimal rate to be around ~60hkz (which of course doesn’t exist in practice).
MP3 with a good compressor and reasonable bitrate has repeatedly shown to be indistinguishable from uncompressed. The reason to avoid mp3 is to be able to squeeze the bitrate and save on storage bandwidth - but that has mattered less year on year.
I'm personally baffled and irritated by this move from Apple. They'll be selling healing crystals next.
> MP3 with a good compressor and reasonable bitrate has repeatedly shown to be indistinguishable from uncompressed.
With most samples, yes. The issue, as I said, is that psychoacoustic codecs are basically heuristic by definition, and so you can pretty much always find counterexamples. It's possible to say 320kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from uncompressed for most samples; it is not possible to say it is indistinguishable for all samples, present and future.
It's also the case that lossy encoding is a bad idea if you're going to be further processing the audio in any way; repeated transcodes definitely start bringing out the artifacts more. So lossless music is always something worth having as an option.
Now, when you start talking about "high-resolution" 96/192k 24b stuff... yeah, that's just as good as healing crystals.
Do you have a FLAC of that around or know where I can buy one? I'm quite curious to try it myself, and see if I can figure out what happened. I wonder if it's an encoder bug, a real format limitation, or a problem with the original song (e.g. a clipping ISP issue, which would be solved by slightly reducing the volume before encoding).
It is useful to make the distinction, because some people do want to have the highest available quality (and this is not, inherently, a bad thing) - having a hard line that separates out the minor, but nonzero effects, from the pure snake oil, is useful.
And as I said, really, the main reason to avoid lossy compression at this point is due to generational loss and post processing. Lossy compression should be considered a final processing step - what you do to store music that is then going to be delivered directly to a listener, unaltered. If you're going to do anything else, you'd do much better with a lossless version.
That is not to say, of course, that if all you have is a lossy version, it is a major problem :-)
For the record, my lossy format of choice for e.g. putting stuff on my phone is 96kbps Opus. Even that much is excellent for casual listening. But I much prefer to keep lossless FLACs as my primary archival storage - not just because that way I can take advantage of better compression formats as they come (e.g. how I moved from ~130k Vorbis to ~96k Opus), but also because compression makes a massive difference with certain kinds of processing and editing which I sometimes enjoy doing. All the psychoacoustics go out the window if you start doing things like subtracting instrumental mixes from full mixes to get vocal tracks out.
While I can understand the frustration, it’s worth noting that they’re not increasing the price of subscription and giving people additional options. To me, it’s more like trying to tell people with 4K screens to watch 8K content, but what do I know.
These sorts of tests are BS in my opinion. How often are you listening to the same track 3 times across different quality settings in the same listening session?
The only "real" test for these sorts of things is
> You've got a new device. Your streaming app defaults to low-quality upon installation. How long until you notice this?
There are plenty of things that can poison the user experience that don't rise above the sub-conscious. Just because you don't notice something doesn't mean that if that thing is improved, you won't have a better experience. E.g. an added 15ms latency on a website.
I'm actually quite skeptical random people with high end gear can hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless. It has more to do with ear training, mp3 compression is not really on the same axis than what high end gear give you (basic equipment can have a large frequency response).
On the topic of ear training and hearing differences most people don't hear, I had a recording I was mixing down that featured a squeaky kick pedal on the bass drum. I spent more time than I should have trying to scoop that out of the mix, and in the end, I could still hear the squeaky kick pedal, but no one else in the band could.
Later that week I put in a CD with songs I'd heard hundreds of times, and to my absolute horror, I could now hear the squeak of that drummer's kick pedal, like an icepick jabbing me in the ear. It had been there the whole time, pressed to millions of CDs, broadcast over countless radio stations, but only became apparent to me after intense focus on that particular sound.
I imagine that people who claim to hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless experience something like that. There may be a particular, narrow band of frequencies that sound slightly more modulated in 320 when compared to lossless, but unless you make a concerted, drawn out effort to find that, you'll never know. And if you do make that effort, you can end up ruining your otherwise pleasant experience for absolutely no good reason.
Anyway, after the kick pedal squeak incident, I switched to listening to wholly electronic music for the next month or so as a palette cleanser, and I haven't picked up on the squeak anywhere else since.
When you say "score well" on that test, what does that mean? From the marketing around lossless, they make it sound like most folks will get 6 out of 6. I've got good monitors and good hearing (in the audiology sense), and I can mostly rule out the 128kbps, but it's a tossup between 320 and lossless.
It really depends on the encoder and song; I think the vast majority of people would have a very hard time getting above-chance on an ABX test vs a properly encoded MP3 at 320kbps, but I would not discount specific instances where things fall over and it still introduces artifacts that you can learn to recognize. Lossy compression is, unfortunately, not predictable in this sense, so there are always corner cases (or even outright bugs in encoders).
Here's one result which lines up pretty much with what I'd expect - if you get lucky with very specific songs/styles, you can pick out a 320kbps mp3, just barely, with good playback hardware.
Being able to discern a difference in a side-by-side test doesn't really mean much.
You can tell which of 2 similar shades of blue is lighter next to each other, but if you were to look at one and then another a day apart you probably couldn't say which was lighter
It's a good point about optimization of certain things in general. Like, yeah, someone might post a study that in an anechoic chamber you can tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio, but how much of a difference is that making for people in the real world? Often when I listen to music, I'm at the gym, or the office, surrounded by all sorts of background noise that is going to impact my experience way more than compression.
I just got 5/6 with just my MacBook Pro speakers (but am a musician). "Bigger and stronger" is kind of an asinine way to describe the difference though. Was "you hear more subtle details" too many words?
Test using pixel 4 xl built in speakers at 2/3 volume. You don't need high end gear, you can pick artifacts in half the test cases almost more easily on low end speakers. A few of the tracks only become noticeable once theyre busy.
You may be confusing data compression with dynamic range compression, since you mention dynamic range. Dynamic range compression (limiting / brick wall limiting) has nothing to do with data compression, which is just referring to the removal of unnecessary data that is not noticeable from a psychoacoustic perspective (eg humans can’t hear above 24khz so that data isn’t needed, etc.) here is more info on DRC and MP3:
http://www.tonestack.net/articles/digital-audio-compression/...
That test was amazing. You made me really excited and I even guessed the first one correctly by seemingly hearing the difference. So I spent minutes on each of the other questions, listening and listening, but I just couldn't hear it and sure enough I guessed wrong on every other question after that.
And I have a mid-range mini amp that fits in between my books, and two mid-range dali speakers hooked up with a regular 3.5mm outlet to my Ryzen MSI PC board, volume up to max on the computer but not on the amp.
If they are delivering a compressed file and an uncompressed file, that already disqualifies the test. The only way to do ABX comparisons is to round-trip one version through the encoder and back to the original format. Anything else introduces uncontrolled dependencies (e.g. on a particular device's decoder implementation) and side channels that unblind the experiment (like loading time).
This is a common mistake people make, e.g. comparing 48k vs 96k files. What you need to do is take a 96k original, downsample it to 48k, upsample it again to 96k (both using very high quality algorithms), then compare it to the original 96k file again. Otherwise you're relying on your playback software or hardware's resampling algorithm, and I guarantee that's a compromise between quality and performance, and not valid for a scientific test.
It's technically possible to distinguish between 320kbps and loseless but it's nothing to do with perceived sound quality or not but more of whether you're trained to hear high-freq sound domain which tends to more suffer from compression.
Audio is a deep rabbit rabbit hole.
There is always a next level of quality. You can hear the difference, so always a reason to spend just a bit more. Then you have a 100k setup and someone is wondering why you just book the band directly.
I run what I consider to be "good high-end gear" and am surprised that I cannot even tell the difference between 128kbps and 320 kbps, let alone lossless...
I have a pretty fancy stereo system that I bought when I really didn't have enough money to afford such things, and I do like it, but I feel like any quality difference that I hear when I'm playing lossless audio is largely psychosomatic. An mp3 or AAC with a high bit rate sounds pretty damn good, so it's fine for nearly anything.
All that being said, I still use FLAC for nearly everything for two reasons: 1) Since it's lossless, it makes a good "transit medium"; I can have some assurances that it's not going to degrade in quality with subsequent renders if I import the audio into a video editor and export it to 24 Bit FLAC.
2) Hard drive space is pretty cheap nowadays. I have a home streaming server that I set up to stream to my stereo (doesn't do any additional compression from the input source), and even if it is psychosomatic, I do like knowing that I have the highest quality possible. I'll admit it's silly, but the music sounds better psychologically because I know it's lossless, even if I realistically cannot tell a difference in a blind test.
I agree with you. And besides, even if the difference is psychosomatic, do we need to split hairs between our brain saying it's better because of internal bias or external stimulus?
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.
I've been storing my FLAC files as ALAC for iTunes compatibility for the past decade. Max.app on macOS, while old and creaky looking, does a fine job of transcoding them and maintaining tags.
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, repeat above), but I'm lazy and ffmpeg doesn't update frequently. I have no idea if ffmpeg can maintain ID3 tags from FLAC->ALAC or not, but if you have need of this knowledge someday, say hi to that future for me!
(And if compilation fails with a specific weird error about corefoundation corevideo coreaudio etc, uninstall and reinstall your macOS command line tools, because they're broken; `sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools ; xcode-select --install` will do that.)
I wonder why you wouldn't just use ALAC full time? As mentioned in my other comment any decent piece of software or hardware supports ALAC these days.
Sure, if you don't have any use for iTunes or iOS FLAC is the obvious choice, but if you do use iTunes there's really no need to keep two formats around. Just use ALAC.
>ALAC is an open source format, which has all benefits as other open source format e.g. FLAC.
Technically, it's still not as good. For instance, FLAC includes a checksum of the audio data, whereas ALAC doesn't.
FLAC also compresses a bit better (=smaller file sizes) and decodes a bit faster (=lower CPU/battery usage).
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.
Apple created ALAC as a closed source project after FLAC had already been released as Open Source. They subsequently changed ALACs license to Open Source -- presumably to take advantage of further development from the community.
The main benefit of lossless is the ability to convert to other formats, including other lossless formats that might have better longevity. So as long as you can convert it to FLAC once downloaded it is doing its job.
Yes exactly. And likewise with trying to avoid DRM via some sort of loopback device that is now lossless too.
I can't information theoretically argue for this. But I can algebraically argue lossless conversion rather than storage is great, and this seems great for the war against bad IP legal regimes.
Too bad they are probably only doing this because they feel that with streaming's dominance, the IP regime is not at risk.
To increase interoperability with existing libraries for example. The user group that has some kind of Apple device, and thus potentialy ALAC encoded audio is quite large.
Yes. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'd be surprised if any of the subscription streaming audio services let you download unencrypted, unencumbered FLAC/lossless files. That would seem to run counter to the whole concept of a subscription pricing model.
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 with good earphones and focusing hard on the small details.
I've given up on arguing with audiophiles about this. In the end if they enjoy their overpriced setups to listen to 196kHz 32bits-per-sample uncompressed tracks who am I to tell them otherwise? It won't keep me from listening to compressed audio on my cheapo USB DAC with my mid-range earphones and enjoying it just as much.
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 audio and I'm like... Ah, that's annoying, because it's yet another proprietary gimmick, and it means the format will likely be incompatible with everything else. You could see a proliferation of audio files that are only usable on Apple devices. Stereo seems... Based in physical reality, ubiquitous, and very practical. I hope Google doesn't try to copy them just like they did after Apple decided to remove the headphone jack, because that wasn't an upgrade. Deprecating trusted, reliable technology to try to entice buyers is not an upgrade.
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.
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.
I got an IPhone for work and I was extremely excited during unpackaging and giving my personal information to Apple.
It took only a few weeks for disappointment over slow transitions, buggy apps, and annoying updates.
Today I'm not sure how I could live without a few Android exclusive things, Linux, ad block, macros. They might be available for IPhone, but it's mind numbingly easy to get started.
Final complaint, our grandparents got iPhones because it was supposed to be easy. Apple logins and lingo made it difficult to use.
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 like their placebos can enjoy their placebos; the rest of us can get on with our lives.
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.
There's plenty of double blind ABX test results at https://hydrogenaud.io that contradict this, and with some material at even higher bitrates. Mostly it's experienced listeners making useful contributions to codec developers.
The worst thing we ever did for audio quality was focus on short A/B tests. It seems like a decent idea, and works for big differences, but ears are not great at it.
Much better results would be had with 1 month of A, then switching to B.
I can’t find the references I got that from (it was decently respected people in the audiophile world talking about their experience with AB tests over a decade or two), but it’s also true in my own experience.
As well, I feel like the same concept is being used when people listen to the same recording of the same track every time they are trying out new headphones or speakers.
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.
> There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder
Really? From tests I did way back in the day, the quality was comparable at around half the size. It's a shame Vorbis support isn't widespread though, given that it's royalty-free. Let's hope Opus has a better fate.
Even on bog-standard Android, Ogg files tend not to be as well supported by random music programs compared to MP3. I re-ripped a few CDs in MP3 that I'd also foolishly done to ogg just have them play gapless in VLC I think it was (might have been some other app, I forget now), otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. And another app I use to slow down or pitch shift tracks to play along to or transcribe didn't work with anything but MP3 for a long time, though that at least got an update.
>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 family. I just want to hear the story!
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 continuously feed the audio buffer with no gap. This has nothing to do with mp3 and digital audio, but everything with players that don't conceptually split between reading a file and pushing audio to the output but are just glorified shell for loops over mpg321.
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.
> 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:
I didn't really pick up on it until I decided to take my son through Thick as Brick and literally any album by Yes. They're just ruined by that small gap.
> But, and this the article does not mention, is not what Apple Music wants you to do. The formats will be proprietary with DRM.
For what it’s worth, music actually purchased on iTunes (not an Apple Music subscription) has been DRM-free for years. If this means iTunes-purchased songs are lossless now, that might be useful.
Just a FYI in case you didn’t know, but Vorbis is kinda superseded by Opus now, which is a newer, royalty-free lossy codec that has a few nice qualities, such as, if I understand correctly, less decoding latency, higher compression ratio for similar perceptual quality. It has been the high quality audio codec for sites like Youtube for a while now.
I just wish digital audio players would pick it up.
Anecdotally, I haven't bought a single CD since the Sony rootkit fiasco. I had bought one, got rootkit'd at the time, and vowed not to buy another. I don't regret not buying any more.
Modern software makes that rootkit seem almost pedestrian by comparison.
Also, I believe you had to install junk software from the CD to a Windows or Mac Computer, before those OSs were hardened somewhat. Avoiding all things Sony seems a better strategy than otherwise benign CDs.
Once upon a time, iTunes would automatically rip a CD for you. It would even name the tracks, artist, and get the album art for you and integrate it all into your regular itunes library. I don't know if they still do (or if apple even makes cd drives anymore).
Until your streaming service gets sold, goes out of business, "pivots," decides you or your worldviews aren't trendy, thinks you're a hacker, screws up your billing, drops support for your device, or any of the hundreds of other reasons the music suddenly stops.
Yes, this happens once in a blue moon. I've bought one album because of this, and the content returned to Spotify within a few weeks of its departure.
It is still, for me, a cheaper and more flexible option despite licensing squabbles. It also gives me the opportunity to find new artists and give albums a few listens before deciding on whether or not they do it for me.
My views are USA-centric, perhaps licensing issues are more prevalent in other countries.
Why not both? Spotify is cheap. I spend a fair amount on vinyl and CD/SACD (SACD/CD for classical and the occasional jazz record, vinyl for everything else) and still keep a sub for spotify for work listening and being able to just check something out - although I guess YouTube can do that for free in most cases, and with electronic music, often the only streamable recording of a lot of records.
More and more phones are removing uSD card support. It's a losing battle.
I don't want the plastic, the physical storage requirements, etc, of a CD. With digital I don't "own" the music, sure, but I've definitely lost more music in my life from scratched discs, people not returning CDs than I ever will through Spotify.
I think the biggest difficulty right now is that streaming is probably more lucrative for distributors, so there's very little incentives for artists to continue releasing albums. Buying compact discs is something that will likely get increasingly harder to do.
And unlike streaming services or paid "digital downloads", there's no chance of an "inaudible watermark" that turns out to be audible in some cases! Thanks, Universal Music Group.
Well, there is that. But there's also the music produced by independent artists who release on YT. So much music isn't ever mastered to or printed on the cheap plastic magic mirrors.
The last time I bought a cd-looking disc, the "CD" "CompactDisc" logo/words/terms were nowhere on it, inside or out.
I seem to recall that meant they weren't actually CDs, they just happened to look exactly like them, and usually function in a CD player. Computers often had trouble with them.
I don't know if this is true, or just bs, but there you go.
The logo you want is the CD Digital Audio logo which requires adherence to the red book standard. Music discs with Sony root kit DRM did not have this logo.
CDs aren't lossless unless the material was recorded at or below 16 bit/44.1kHz.
You can argue whether the difference is perceptible - some blind studies suggest not - but this fact is what led to a variety of semi-obscure audiophile disc formats that offered higher sampling rates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD).
That's not a definition of lossless that anyone else uses.
The definition of lossless is that either no compression algorithm was used or the compression algorithm is capable of precisely recreating the original bits in as bits out. If you feed a lossless mechanism an 8 bit 3.5KHz mono bitstream, it must reproduce the same 8 bit 3.5Khz mono bitstream at the other end. Quality out equals quality in.
In your definition, no sound is ever lossless because no microphones can ever capture the complete audio experience available from a live performance - if you move your head a quarter of a wavelength, the sound will change.
OT but since there are tons of professionals and audiophiles here - do anyone notice what can only be called CD artifact? There seems to be something "wrong" with CD that no other formats has, digital or analog.
There is no such thing as a CD artifact for a CD in good condition. You can burn a 44.1/16 WAV to CD, rip it, and get the same exact file out. I do, all the time (I burn indie CDs and this is how I verify them).
Wow, 26Khz at 110 dBSPL? That's just stupid. You might as well argue that incidental exposure to wifi is certainly fatal because you wouldn't survive being cooked inside a microwave.
110 dBSPL represents thousands of times more energy (in watts) than you could plausibly expect in any musically derived ultrasonic content played at a volume level which doesn't pose a significant risk of permanent hearing loss. At such insane power levels, obviously nobody will be hearing the actual frequency but rather sub-harmonics and/or other physical sensations derived from that moronic level of sound pressure.
At normal listening levels, yup. I'm 30 and I can certainly hear the hideous 19 kHz anti-rat blasters they have all over shops in Tokyo (and I think they almost certainly cause ear damage and should be illegal - IIRC they are marketed as putting out 138dB SPL!) but I am rather unlikely to hear the difference between music low-passed at 19kHz and 20kHz.
> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless.
Two things... CD quality (16 bit / 44.1 kHz stereo) was "big" in the eighties but it now makes for really tiny files. 1 TB harddisk and much more are common for consumers. Why are we still even arguing about 320 kbps mp3 when we can have provably bitperfect rips of our CDs, which can serve both as archive and for listening?
The second thing: from the other side of a big room I cannot tell the difference between a 100 dpi color printing of a painting and a 1200 dpi color printing of that same painting. Well... Even if I cannot tell the difference I do prefer to know I have the 1200 dpi print and not the 100 dpi one.
Why would I even take the risk, even I cannot consciously tell the difference, to have something of lesser quality?
mp3 was lots of fun in the Napster days when we were running 28.8 k baud modems and had 3.2 GB HDD. But nowadays I've got 1 TB HDDs... To me the mp3 ship has sailed and won't be missed. It's FLAC and only FLAC. CD quality everywhere. I don't own SACD (maybe I should) but got a lot of CDs. And FLACs are my CD in digital version. mp3s simply aren't.
And that's in 2021. I cannot imagine, say, in 2026. This "mp3 vs flac" argument is never ever going to go back in favor of mp3: as time passes the room it takes to store your music collection as FLAC keeps getting proportionally tinier and tinier.
Apple tosses togethor lossless and high res in this article, it states that its whole catalog will be available in lossless format and also this "For the true audiophile, Apple Music also offers Hi-Resolution Lossless all the way up to 24 bit at 192 kHz".
It doesnt say if the high res tracks are included in a subscription which is interesting as competing services usually have a higher price tier for this. Services like Tidal & Qobuz differentiate themselves on high res but it is such a tiny percentage of their catalog thats its often a waste of effort.
And then there is the whole hardware support question, Android down samples everything and Apples codec over bluetooth isnt going to support anything high res anyway.
This all sounds like features for the average user (bigger numbers are better) where in reality it probably holds value for less than 1% of users.
Apple’s own high-end headphones can’t even handle the lossless files.
I suspect like many things, that this is Apple’s attempt at providing a service that’s just valid enough that they can dry up the competitors then relax their quality and get back to selling the products they want to sell people.
I buy FLAC so that I can easily convert my music to other formats without making 2nd generation lossy copies. Being able to convert my entire library to AAC, pre-apply my ReplayGain data, and shove it on to my iPhone is real handy.
This just seems like a waste of bandwidth for streaming though.
> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless.
It's been said many times, but with good equipment and familiarity with the instruments of the genre can (and will) change the outcome of these tests.
320CBR MP3 will sound extremely good, but with a good system and some relaxed listening in a silent environment will highlight the differences for who knows what to listen for.
By a "good system" I don't mean $10K+ systems on isolated rooms. A good vintage amplifier with a relatively modern CD player with good quality (Burr Brown / Wolfson) DAC and high quality speakers is enough.
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.
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.
>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".
Yes, but lossless audio is still useful for transcoding. If you want to play music on your phone, and you have plenty of fixed hard drive space on your desktop (which is very cheap), it's rational to compress with an advanced codec to ~90 kbps since your headphones probably aren't good enough to pass anything more hi-fi and you want space for pictures and videos. However, if your downloads come lossy compressed, you'll introduce transcoding artifacts; you can get around this by transcoding at a significantly higher bitrate, but now the compressed file is wasting space!
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 that they broadcast in pretty low bitrates. I agree that there must be a point where the difference is negligible but people have taken the argument that you won’t hear the difference so far that they’re wiping out the heart of music on radio.
That's interesting. I haven't paid that much attention, and I don't purport to have a great ear for these things, but whenever my car FM radio switches over to HD I always perceive a quality increase. It could be that there is wild variation based on the digital encoder hardware/software different radio stations use for their HD streams.
I am not sure whether it has been improved, but back when the Ibiquity HD was being deployed, the codec actually synthesized sound above something like 5 to 8Khz at the receiver, all depending on the bitrate choices and band, AM having a lower overall available bitrate to work with.
Someone noted a song by the Bangles, which featured a little finger cymbal. (Two discs worn on a finger and thumb)
That sound was missing and or rendered poorly. Turns out it offers very little sound under 5Khz. The codec parameters were increased to address those few cases, but are still below 10Khz, I believe.
The other discussion was quality over choice. Fact is a full FM bitstream performed great. More than good enough to really enjoy in a car. Most people would trade the losses for lack of fuzz and noise present on analog RF.
"CD Quality" was, and today is not accurate at all in the technical sense, but the overall feel is more like a CD than it is analog media, so... that is what they went with.
However, being able to offer several streams meant multiple branding, commercial free streams to promote digital radio, and, and, and.
Mostly, that discussion resolved to choice being king over quality. Improving quality at the expense of choice = wasted bits. That is by far the dominant view in broadcast.
A little thought experiment explains why:
Say you have a radio, and you get two stations. One offers compelling content, but the quality is low. The other is amazing good quality, but is just not compelling.
Which do you listen to?
Given others find the same material compelling that you do, which do you believe they will listen to?
And that is why peak quality on broadcast is no longer a thing.
Streaming services can offer compelling and quality choices to a higher degree than broadcast can, which means generally higher quality, even when available bitrates are, or could be. comparable. But, if they are ever pinned, they will favor choice over quality in a pinch, because compelling content wins over quality nearly all the time.
I pretty much gave up on radio around this time too. Being able to carry a good music library around meant just using a car system as an output device.
For a time, I did enjoy live or daily broadcasts, talk, news, sports. But, those carry such a high commercial load, and when phones and data plans began to favor streaming, I switched completely.
...all of which is why I am not too current on how HD Radio performs today. Next time I rent a car, I will have to scan the dial to see what, if anything, has changed.
IME: you get quantitation error with very quiet sounds (or dark things in video) which gets amplified by the lossy encodings. It's not normally apparent but there are cases where it is.
I prefer FLAC/OggVorbis/etc when it comes to music. But then I like to be able to mix/remix.
Who's to say that Apple now or in the future might not want to do what amounts to dynamic "re-mixing" on-device? Presumably whatever adaptive tricks they might like to pull to make your music sound better or sync up to AR scenes or ... would benefit from the uncompressed source.
I've got two recordings of Machine Head's Through The Ashes Of Empires, one 320kbps mp3 and one flac, which is the one I usually listen to.
So some day I'm listening to that album as I'm wont to do and I notice there's some cracks missing. After questioning my sanity a bit it turns out the mp3 ones somehow managed to sneak into my playlist.
Metallica's Death Magnetic is going to sound like shit whether you play it with lossless or lossy audio. You can't fix a bad mix. The other extreme are things I would love to hear in lossless audio and Dolby Atmos but it would have to be re-mastered and there's limits for what was captured on the original audio tape. Pink Floy'd Dark Side of the Moon is one example.
Do you think the record labels would be fine with Apple streaming their IP in a lossless and DRM-free format? It's self-evident that DRM-free is objectively more versatile, but it's also self-evident that it can't not have DRM for business reasons.
People don't know what to listen for. The compression artefacts may seem like artistic choice to people rather than a loss of quality.
Once you know what to listen for, you can almost always tell the difference, even on lower quality listening devices.
This is true, most of 320kbps is indistinguishable, but high hats are often subject to artifacts, including pre-noise that occurs before the sound is supposed to begin. To some it might sound intentional, like a very subtle reverse high hat or other room effect.
This and also transients - they sound in a specific way through the way the compression works. Once you hear it, it is difficult to stop paying attention to it.
Right, high hats are a source of transients which get smeared because there’s a minimum block size in mp3 that is somehow too big to encode it temporally.
This is Apple and its loyal follower base (their customer base is different) we are talking about. The followers who would have gone week in the knees right after those words.
Personal experience: most people can not differentiate anything above 128kbps mp3. Some can, but don't care. A lot of people listen to music in noisy environments with lower quality blue-tooth devices that decrease audio quality even more and make it way harder to differentiate from anything better than 128kbps mp3. Most current music is heavily dynamic compressed leaving very little space to differentiate better codecs. And the new generation of listeners is getting so used to compression artifacts that a cleaner sound may feel strange and unfamiliar.
The German c't magazin did an extensive test back in 2000 using pricey audiophille equipment (Sennheiser Orpheus, B&W Nautilus 803). 256k MP3 was statistically tied with the Compact Disc source.
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 "deluxe" versions; split albums and intersperse tracks between both; and duplicate songs in albums.
The albums usually still exist in Apple Music—I just have to go out of my way to remove the mangled music and re-add the album. Problem is, there is no warning or notification it happened.
Examples:
[1] https://pasteboard.co/K2kdUN3.png
This album is totally messed up. Multiple track 3 with different titles, one unavailable, missing tracks that were re-added to my library as singles.
[4] https://pasteboard.co/K2kfBTR.png
Originally added the original version of Camp by Childish Gambino to my library—here it's split between deluxe and basic, with tracks arbitrarily mixed between both.
> Apple can add feature after feature, but if Music continues to [random issue most people have never encountered], it's close to useless.
I've started to feel like "Apple Music as a music library" was really only intended as a bridge for people like you and me that were reluctant to abandon their obsessively curated their music library for the brave new world of streaming music. After a few years of it my listening habits have changed and I've more or less let go and stopped worrying about the drudgery of maintaining "my library".
I abandoned my music library after I went to Apple Music. But 5 years later I'm going back. The licensing issues and split albums OP mentioned have basically annoyed the hell out of me. Quite a lot of old music from my childhood is basically gone for good from Apple Music/Spotify. I have a smart playlist which basically lists all tracks which are no longer available on Apple Music and it has a 7 day playtime. Quite a good chunk of my library is basically greyed out and when these albums return they are basically messed up, if not outright replaced with other versions.
The reliability and simplicity of my own music library can't come back soon enough. I'll still keep AM and Spotify for discovering new music though.
> I abandoned my music library after I went to Apple Music. But 5 years later I'm going back.
How do you deal with the cost? I pay $18/month for Apple Music (Family) and I can listen to thousands of tracks in a single day if I wanted to. That same experience would cost me thousands of dollars up front to kick start it.
This also isn't to mention the fact that not all music is available to buy legally online. Dimmu Borgir, for example, use Nuclear Blast and I struggle to find retailers online that can sell me MP3s outside of iTunes. I don't want to have to deal with (read: rip) CDs and vinyl is a joke at 3x the price (not to mention simply being a dead format.)
So how are you going to curate a library, legally, so that the artist is supported, assuming you have at least 20-30 artists you like.
You use an example of your ability to stream a thousand tracks in a single day if you wanted to, I don't have the same aspirations, so I'd also not pay thousands of dollars up from to kick start it.
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 do it less than a thousand times a day however. But I've been at it for thousands of days.
> 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.
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.
You should be able to upload your library to Apple Music (visible to just you). It used to be called iTunes Match, but my understanding is it’s integrated to Apple Music now.
I did but those files are not immune to Apple Music's licensing issues or bugs. If the track was matched and not uploaded, then those albums can still be greyed out when they are pulled from the catalog. And iTunes match still is not accurate. A lot of times tracks in one album are matched to individual singles on apple music.
Uploading your local collection directly into your iCloud Music Library should prevent Apple from messing with the data. I uploaded some albums months ago and they've been untouched by Apple so far.
I've certainly grown less particular about maintaining "my library". But when I hit shuffle, encounter a great song, navigate to the album, and find it mangled, it's... frustrating.
I wish Apple would provide an API that can upload to iCloud Music Library
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
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 horrible for this purpose.
In addition to 99% of artits providing the download version when physical media is purchased. I really appreciate the ability to flip between digital and vinyl media when DJing for many tracks.
I’ve kept my library on an external hard drive and recently abandonned Deezer and Spotify because of the same issues mentioned in this thread. Plex (on a VPS) has been a godsend, and hype machine for discovery is top notch, check it out if you want to find obscure but great music
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.
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.
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 back my music library (that I will be owning for good).
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.
Honestly, the Plex app is very decent for music libraries these days. Except for oddball VA releases and obscure mixtapes I find Plex to often be terrific at library management.
Second about this. I thought Plex would be overkill at first, but Plex is fantastic for streaming personal music library over internet (especially with Plexamp). One of its best feature IMO is you can make it automatically transcode music to Opus when streaming over cellular or download them locally as-is, saving all headaches of syncing to iDevices.
I've avoided using it because of concerns about library size. I want to move off of iTunes (launch a VM just for this) but nothing else seems to really handle managing a library. Currently trying out Airsonic but it is kind of slow and I can't edit tags with it.
I run all songs / albums through MusicBrainz Picard before putting them in the music directory structure so they're fully tagged. It only misses some of the more local / esoteric stuff I've got.
ive been looking into similar things like jellyfin, mopidy etc for a long time, but i find syncthing to be a lot easier to get my head around and i can use whatever audio player on each app or platform. as long as it can play m3u playlists then im good to go.
only downside is that if you have a really large music library you will have to use syncignore filters to stop some things syncing to devices that don't have enough space.
How do you deal with the cost of building a library of legal music? I pay $18/month for Apple Music (Family) and I can listen to thousands of tracks in a single day if I wanted to. That same experience would cost me thousands of dollars up front to kick start it.
This also isn't to mention the fact that not all music is available to buy legally online. Dimmu Borgir, for example, use Nuclear Blast and I struggle to find retailers online that can sell me MP3s outside of iTunes. I don't want to have to deal with (read: rip) CDs and vinyl is a joke at 3x the price (not to mention simply being a dead format.)
So how are you going to curate a library, legally, so that the artist is supported, assuming you have at least 20-30 artists you like.
Buying direct from the artist can be as low as $1 per album. Buying CDs and records used, then posting (edit: photos/hype about) them on social media is a form of social currency that supports the artist (as well, in some countries there are viable legal arguments for downloading pre-ripped files as a form of media shifting when you own the original, which means minimal hassle for turning a CD in to a FLAC)
I've definitely seen this happen as well. It's extremely frustrating. Looking at your screenshots, I'm guessing these were all albums that were matched to your existing library?
Nah, these aren't matched albums. They're directly added from Apple Music. And that's the thing, the albums are fine!
For [1] and [3], I added the album to my library as you see them in the links you provided. Then one day—poof! Albums are mangled, songs have been pulled out into "singles", or I find a new "compilation/greatest hits" version of the album in my library with a subset of the songs, and another subset in the original. Now I have to find all loose tracks, delete them—if I can find them all—then re-add the complete album.
The deluxe version of [4] has an extended track list, but I didn't add that version to my library. Apple Music thought it'd be a great idea to add the deluxe version, and split tracks between both albums so neither version is complete.
I wonder if it is specific to the country. I am accessing the US store and out of all link you posted I have no issues. All EPs and albums are complete and no tracks are missing.
That's right—in Apple's library they're completely fine. You can add them to your own library and they're fine. Then one day the copies in your library have their metadata messed with and everything is scattered with incorrect tags
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 measure head movements in order to adjust the audio accordingly, and new audio formats to make it work.
This may sound interesting if you haven't tried it, but it results in: Either you keep your head stationary and get the non-Spatial Audio sound (i.e. what they optimized for 90%+ of their audience) or whipping your head around to "enjoy" the effect (which is largely a movement accurate degradation).
It feels like cart-before-the-horse tech wherein they figured out they can do this thing, and now want to work backwards into what it may be useful for.
> Either you keep your head stationary and get the non-Spatial Audio sound (i.e. what they optimized for 90%+ of their audience)
I literally have no idea what you're talking about.
Using Spatial Audio on my AirPods Pro is insanely better, and still very much spatial, even without actively moving my head.
First, the sound appears to be coming from outside of my head, rather than between my ears -- no "headphone fatigue". It's vastly more comfortable and realistic.
Second, while dialog comes from straight ahead, sound effects like doors opening, cars honking etc. clearly come from angles, and things like wind come from all around, like an actual surround sound experience.
Third, because the dialog tracks are separated from other sounds spatially, the dialog is easier to understand as well. I used to sometimes put on subtitles for certain material to understand fully in normal stereo -- I never have to anymore with spatial audio.
> Taking traditional multi-source audio (Dolby/Atmos/etc) and jamming it into stereo is old tech
I've used all that old tech too, and for whatever reason Apple's spatial audio is leagues better. I'm not sure if it's something about being optimized for known headphone characteristics, or the head tracking, or something clever with the inward-facing microphones, or all of the above, but it's nothing like that old tech.
> now want to work backwards into what it may be useful for.
It's useful for listening, end of story. I'm honestly mystified why you think it's a gimmick. I can't even imagine going back to listening to movies and TV without it. (I project from my iPad onto a screen, connect my AirPods Pro, and it's basically like being in an actual cinema, but without waking anyone else up at night from booming surround sound.)
Does anyone happen to know of a non-headphone-specific solution for this, which actually does a good job? It doesn't need to work when I move my head, neither does the Virtual Barbershop[1] and yet the effect on my run-of-the-mill earbuds is still incredible.
I'm open to little hardware boxes, software that modifies my computer's audio as it plays, a filter for ffmpeg, etc, as long as I can use whatever headphones I want and the spatial effect is high quality.
Can you offer a good example video? I’ve done some binaural recording in the past, but my reaction so far to Apple’s spatial audio has been… kinda meh.
I remember the first thing I tried when it came out was the first episode of See on the Apple TV+ app. It's a great showcase for it.
It's sci-fi drama so has a lot of really immersive audio, Apple TV+ supports spatial audio, and the first episodes of Apple's series are free so it's easy to try.
Try toggling the Spatial Audio option as you're watching to really get a sense of the difference. It's huge.
See is amazing for it, even though I'm not a big fan of the show. It's so heavily based on sounds and audio that they really went all out on the audio for it.
I think most of what you're saying applies to 3D TV, too. And that ended up being a dud. IMO the problem with both is that they're an awful shared experience, and a lot of TV watching is done by more than one person at a time.
3D has tons of drawbacks though -- the image is less than half as bright, glasses are clunky and not used for anything else, there's still serious ghosting effects. It's really half-baked, alas. Also there's only a tiny fraction of content in 3D. (The best way to view 3D movies, funnily enough, is in a virtual theater on the Oculus Quest 2.)
Spatial audio is different. It has zero downsides over existing headphones, and nearly all movies and TV episodes are mastered in 5.1 so the source signal is everywhere.
And it's not meant for a shared experience. That's what actual surround speakers in your living room are for. But these days tons of movies and TV are consumed privately with headphones, and so spatial audio simply recreates a similar surround experience on the headphones you're already using.
So I think it's pretty different -- just a pure positive upgrade. It doesn't have tradeoffs like 3D does.
> (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 actual VR content, the Index is great, but for normal stereoscopic movies, using just the projector with a pair of special glasses is much more comfortable.
I do wish enabling 3D didn't dull the colors on the projector, but it's still clearly preferable to a headset IMO.
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.
In theory, but there are good reasons why cinemas and home projectors don't "just" double (or really, need to quadruple because of how the shutters work).
Heat dissipation requirements go up hugely because the bulb is so much hotter.
You simply can't buy a home projector that is 4x brighter. I looked into it earlier this year -- they simply don't exist.
Because if they did, the fan noise required to cool the bulb would be so loud you wouldn't even be able to hear the movie.
However, a lot of advances are being made with both laser and LED "bulbless" projectors... so it might actually be coming in the not-so-far future.
It's weird because I've had the BEST experience with apple in terms of shared experiences. I go to share audio on my iphone, then I share with my wifes airpods. Seems to work fine.
Everyone is different, I suppose. A shared TV watching experience where we're both plugged into our own isolated audio and can't hear each other talk would be an awful experience for me.
Actually apple has a setting for this (at least on the pro's) which is called transparency. Works surprisingly well.
You get the TV / movie audio in ear, and then any other audio from outside.
We use it to keep an ear out for kids (bathroom breaks / falls off bed or whatever) and to chat with each other.
But yes - some people do hate apple products - so different uses I think for different folks.
My one MAJOR complaint is the volume of the mode switch sound on these things is way way too loud! Perhaps there is a setting for that I haven't found. Bong! in the ear is super annoying. Make it a click or something.
Not only is everyone different, but we have different needs at different times. My partner and I use shared audio infrequently, but when we need it, we need it.
Our use case is watching something together in bed while the kids are going to sleep. We put our AirPods Pro in “Transparent” mode, which allows us to converse with each other just fine.
To say that “Your Mileage May Vary” would be putting it mildly. I accept that this feature may not be useful for you, in exactly the same way that Dark Mode in IOS is not useful for me, but seems to have its fans.
It gets activated on any audio source in a surround sound format, it can’t be applied to stereo sources because stereo audio doesn’t contain any positional info
> 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.
For what it's worth, I have a pair of Audeze headphones that has 3D head tracking or whatever they call it, and I don't think it's a gimmick.
When I'm wearing those and watching a movie on my TV (or playing a game on my PC), the sound really does appear to be coming from in front of me (or beside/behind me depending on the channel or the mix), and if I turn my head, the sound stays put.
It's somewhat subtle, but it can make me forget that I'm wearing headphones and I personally find it really adds to the experience.
Why is that useful though? "It's like I'm really listening to a TV!". Isn't that what people try to avoid with expensive sound systems that offer surround sound?
With the AirPods + Apple TV content spatial audio makes it sound like the audio is coming through more than just the two channels. It's much more natural sounding that stereo in headphones.
I never claimed this was useful, I said I found it enjoyable and having had this headset for 3+ years now, I can say that - speaking for myself - this is not a "gimmick" that I've grown tired of or turned off.
The cart before the horse doesn’t sound very Apple like. They’re the kind to keep it private and mess with it until they find a use for it and get it working very well.
Instead they’d just find a way to make the battery bigger because they know people care a ton about that.
Also, everyone keeps talking about consciously moving your head around. Record yourself doing something on your computer for 5 minutes and watch how much your head already, unconsciously moves around. It’s a lot.
Yes it’s subtle, but it’s supposed to be. You’re meant to forget about it. It’s trying to more accurately reproduce our natural abilities.
> The cart before the horse doesn’t sound very Apple like. They’re the kind to keep it private and mess with it until they find a use for it and get it working very well.
It's working very well on iPhones and Apple Watches and has great use cases. It was axed on newer iPhones because of discoverability issues and little amount of people being even aware it exists and how to use it.
I still miss force touch on keyboard to move cursor around (instead of pressing spacebar, holding it and waiting)
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.
The most important thing about spatial audio in AirPods is that they have head tracking, and so sound will appear to be coming from the same places if you move your head around. It doesn't work nearly as well without that.
I think the key thing has been enough processing for dynamic/real time spatial audio via HRTF. Despite being “just” audio, applying a HRTF can be pretty processing intensive, especially for a mobile device. Those binaural audio experiences were all pre-computed.
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?
Indeed, so you're getting degradation/distortion of the audio source most of the time. That's why most people try it a couple of times then turn it off.
I am agreeing that you cannot keep your head completely still, and then pointing out that that fact means Spatial Audio is constantly causing audio adjustments with seemingly no basis which degrades the listening experience.
The argument that Spatial Audio makes more tiny adjustments is an argument against Spatial Audio, not an argument for it.
Why do you think it degrades the listening experience?
The mixes are already made for surround sound. It's not arbitrary, so not "no basis" like you say. It's taking a surround mix and anchoring the audio sources.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I turned it off not because of any degradation/distortion, but because the tracking wasn’t that great (on multiple fairly recent devices) and one ‘hiccup’ where you move your head but the audio sticks in place is a bigger minus than any plus from the spatial audio itself.
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 FLACs, ALACs, and CDs. Geez, my music spending has changed completely over the last decade.
Agreed - Spotify's UI is bad and getting worse, and its quality is meh, but its discovery features are top notch and it has the biggest catalog.
I have audiophile equipment - $900 MSRP Hifiman headphones, discrete DAC and amp - and I tried Tidal to see if I could hear a difference. 99% of the time, I can't... and Tidal's MQA format is questionable anyway. (Not sure about Apple's "ALAC" either.) I used a playlist importer to get my playlists to Tidal, and about 90% of my tracks made it - with some obvious mismatches/songs not found for unclear reasons. (There were also, in fairness, a few songs Tidal did have which the import tool missed.)
But Tidal just doesn't seem to have the radio and discovery features I use to find new music. If I used it, I'd have to constantly sync all my tracks (by paying for an external service) and risk losing some of them, for an audio quality difference that even most audiophiles seem to admit is negligible unless you're in ideal listening conditions with a track you know extremely well.
So even though they're constantly making things worse, I will stick with Spotify for now.
ALAC and FLAC are technically very similar formats [1]. Both are bit-perfect. Compare with MQA which is utter garbage and has absolutely zero to do with losless. MQA is actually, objectively worse than 16 bit audio CDs. An abject failure backed by an aggressively anti-science company backed up by a bunch of lawyers.
[1] Both encode a PCM stream using linear prediction while storing the difference between the predictor's output and the actual samples. This allows recreating the samples with zero error when decompressing. It's functionally equivalent to .wav.gz.
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 a placebo? If someone can't tell the difference between low quality recordings and high quality recordings, why should they go through the trouble of sourcing the high quality stuff.
It's so easy to lose track of the subjective nature of audio in all of the objective details.
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.
To be honest though, what's the science behind any of these formats in terms of listening experience? Clearly there are differences in the data and how much of the original content is represented. But have there been any studies on whether people can actually tell any difference?
I've come across some quizzes online, etc., and those mostly suggest I can sometimes tell, but even when I can, it's not obvious and it doesn't really impact my experience. Would be curious whether anyone has studied this more fully.
Over and over again I’ve been impressed with Tidal’s song radio functionality. Unless you’re trying it out with very obscure songs that might only have a few listens total on the platform, Tidal’s radio always recommends tracks that are specific to that track’s subgenre/region. Meanwhile Spotify always seems to recommend songs that are only mildly related and that I’ve already listened to.
Other than playlists, it feels more difficult to discover new music on Spotify than on Tidal.
Is shuffling large playlists still broken on Android for Tidal (only shuffles the first 30 or so and then nothing)?
That problem got me to unsubscribe even though I was loving the HiFi streaming. It was broken around Christmas 2019 and still was broken months later. They're Android app receives little to no support.
To me that's a great feature from Spotify, as I like exploring lota a lot of different genres and sounds. But I can see that is a personal taste and others would prefer a different experince.
>I have audiophile equipment - $900 MSRP Hifiman headphones, discrete DAC and amp - and I tried Tidal to see if I could hear a difference. 99% of the time, I can't... and Tidal's MQA format is questionable anyway. (Not sure about Apple's "ALAC" either.)
Comparing Spotify on high settings to the WAVs I have stored on my computer, the difference is hardly noticeable. I'm convinced that Spotify's sound depends more on the systems audio pipeline.
I run Spotify Connect through a Naim Uniti, but I don’t have Tidal support yet. I did test through headphones - Grado - and tried to correct for volume level, but my conclusion was just that they sound slightly different, but not objectively better/worse. I am pleased to hear that others seem to feel the same, as it makes it easier to ignore the competing streaming race and get back to the music…
Dude their adding/removing songs from the Liked Songs list is ridic haha. They had the heart button right next to where you scroll. It's been idiotic for years. How can a company like that have such an obvious flaw in the UI?
I'm a big fan of Qobuz. It has human curated playlists and features, which is really nice. It's also truly lossless unlike MQA.
I'll agree with you that 90% of the time, I can't tell the difference. But for my most loved albums, I still prefer listening to lossless on my hifi system.
Though I generally agree, one ridiculous thing Spotify does is suggesting new releases by just matching the artist's name to your history. Not rarely I get some new releases from a completely different artist just because they have the same name
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.
It's also one of the cleverest examples I've ever seen of turning a limitation into a feature.
Spotify didn't want multiple people sharing a single account, which is relatively easy to implement by preventing multiple devices from listening to different tracks at the same time.
But so they just synced the same stream across all connected devices, and boom -- no longer a limitation, now it's a feature! And a genuinely useful (even indispensable for me) one at that.
I can't think of any other similarly clever solution by any other company where a limitation is genuinely turned into a benefit, but I wonder if anyone else here can.
Agree, it's really nice to start streaming from my computer to my Sonos speakers and know that I can close out the app and it will keep playing. And if I need to change it from across the room, I can just pick up my phone.
I switched from Apple Music to Spotify for around 12 months, starting before but mostly overlapping with the pandemic lockdowns. I found their playlists, auto-play features, and discovery better than Apple Music's. Spotify links are ubiquitous on social media and elsewhere, which is nice (although Apple isn't far off either). And their Spotify Connect ecosystem is pretty nice: I loved how I could click the speaker button in the Spotify app on my iPhone and stream my music to the "Everything" group that plays simultaneously on all 3 Amazon Alexa speakers I have in my apartment. Apple Music's integration with Alexa speakers is nearly non-existent.
But I ended up switching back to Apple Music because of something that seems so minor but is so fundamental: Spotify on iPhone simply does not let you browse your entire library by artist. You can search your library and find anything you want, of course, but there is simply no way to serendipitously browse all the artists in your library. You can "follow" artists and browse all those artists, but that's a separate system from your music library, and when you click on an artist you just get the standard Spotify artist page (rather than a list of that artist's albums that you have in your library). For me this ended up being a dealbreaker and meant that during my Spotify trial I listened to much less music than usual because I simply couldn't browse my library effectively.
You can still do this today though its a bit indirect.
> Your Library --> Artists --> Click artist --> Liked Songs.
The changes to library these services have made for simplification in my opinion are the wrong direction. I want more controls on how to filter/sift through my library, NOT less.
Edit: Also, we're slowly diluting the definition of album. The industry is going away from it because artist release frequency becomes more important in the streaming system. You have to stay relevant by releasing new music so album's are fewer songs with less duration. Lower duration also increases revenue because we pay per stream not by mean time listened to artist. :/
Library -> Artists only shows artists that you have followed, which is a totally separate mechanism than adding songs or albums to your library. Also, I don’t see the Liked Songs option anywhere on the artist page.
I hate this stupid distinction so much as well. The idea that you have to follow artists instead of seeing the artists based on your liked songs or albums is so dumb.
I swear Spotify used to let me browse my library by Artist and only show me the songs I've liked/added for each Artist. But now when I view my library and navigate to an artist, I just get the public artist page.
You're not the only one. This alone is making me want to switch away from Spotify.
Why is it so hard to browse my library by artist?!
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..
I agree. No idea what this is or how it benefits me at all, so of course I did not connect my account. From Google for the curious:
"Music League is a weekly game which lets you share songs with friends and score points for whoever’s track slaps the most.
Each week you’re given a theme, eg. “a song that gets you on the dancefloor”, “a song you’ve loved from this year”, and you have a week to make your submission. The tracks are then all automatically added to an anonymous Spotify playlist which you and your league listen to, before voting for which track you like the best.
You have 10 points to dish out and – for the wannabe music critics among you – comments to leave on each song. When you reach the deadline, the points are tallied and a winner declared."
Sounds fun to me. At my old work, we used to have "song of the week" contest every Friday, where everyone would post the most ridiculous, over the top, goofy videos of actual songs (think Top of the Pops pisstakes, overly earnest power ballads, hair metal, bad 90s fashions, etc) and everyone would vote for their favorite. There were some pretty amazing selections.
I do agree that their landing page is pretty lacking.
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!
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!
I'm sure other music services like Spotify will match Apple Music's lossless quality in order to keep competing for the audiophile market.
Personally, lossless quality just sounds like a great way to blow through my data caps even faster. I'm sure some will love it, I question whether it's worth the extra bandwidth.
> Premium subscribers in select markets will be able to upgrade their sound quality to Spotify HiFi
This sounds like it'll be an additional cost (like it is with Tidal), as opposed to Apple Music. Also I really can't think of a reason why it'd be region-locked.
But anyways, been hoping for this for years and will definitely switch if I'm not geo-locked out of it. I've experimented a lot with FLAC and 320 kbps and I can clearly notice the difference in my mid 20s with a couple of hundred euros worth of audio setup.
One reason it may be region locked for Spotify is that they offer services at throwaway price in certain regions and those regions probably won’t subscribe to a much more expensive variant at enough volume to warrant delivery capacity. They offer Spotify premium for under $2 in Russia and India, for example. Apple offers at similar price point, but they are able to sell expensive phones and earphones that Spotify does not.
I’ve recently been testing the master quality on Tidal, and was excited initially to see the Tidal Atmos offerings, but sadly Atmos isn’t available on the desktop app. I haven’t decided yet if I can hear the difference between Spotify/Tidal masters using a pair of Genelec Monitors.
Apple must have been aware of bluetooth data transfer restrictions when designing AirPod Max.. Seems odd that they didn't include onboard storage for lossless songs, or enable lossless support for AirPod Max while tethered to a MacBook.
If this is a codec issue as the article indicates is there any potential for a software fix?
BT 5.0 in theory could probably stream lossless so it is a bit weird they didn't consider it. Maybe they did and it wasn't really stable enough longer distances.
But not being able to be tethered without using a digital to analog to digital adapter is so silly. Come on apple.
They’ll support spatial audio, but they won’t support lossless, which would need additional hardware. It’s worth noting that you wouldn’t use wireless tech for hi-res audio streaming anyway.
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 I enjoy, and with Spotify you just can't really do that since you never know what's really there because the curator liked it and what's there because the label paid for it.
Fun fact: The Apple Music Android app is suprisingly decent!
> One thing that really differentiates it is that the curated playlists seem a lot more cared for than with Spotify.
Completely agree. This was Beats Music’s raison d’etre, and Apple
Not only maintained the playlist curation team/process/whatever, but have made it bigger and better.
My favorite playlists get regularly updated - seemingly by the same person, or someone with extremely similar tastes in music, and I love it.
This has been my reason to switch to. Apple Music feels more "orderly". They often have detailed essays from album releases and I love that you can filter by label - something that is pretty handy if you like electronic underground music.
The New Music Mix only releases one playlist a week. I believe Discover Weekly releases five playlists a week, each with their own moods. I much prefer Spotify's approach.
However I do find that both services largely recommend the same music to me. They just have different mechanisms of surfacing it.
Discover Weekly is once a week: on Mondays.
You're thinking of Daily Mixes, of which there are 6 that update throughout the week, one playlist per day.
To go along with Discover Weekly there's also a Release Radar playlist that updates every Friday with that week's new releases from your artists.
Spotify is so deeply engrained into my weekly schedule that I really look forward to the Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists bookending my work weeks.
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.
Yeah that's why I could never return to Spotify after using apple music for about a year now.
Spotify seems to be pushing out playlist after playlist without giving much afterthought. The quality is just not there , some seem to be auto-generated and a lot of playlist are duplicate/similar to each other.
Apple's playlist are regularly manually curated and you can know the theme just by glancing through their succinct titles.
For anyone here who is interested in the hi-fi audio experience and may be getting caught up in the debate over higher sampling rates and bit-depths, I'd like to suggest that any improvement Apple's hi-res audio is going to offer in sonic quality is nothing compared to the benefits of treating the acoustics in your listening space. Or conversely the destructive effects of NOT treating your room.
In an untreated room, moving your head to the side by a few inches will have a far greater effect on the frequency response of the recording. More than any gains you could get from upgrading to a hi-res streaming service. You have to have your speakers and your room in order before any of those differences will be appreciable. Additionally, if the reverb time of your room hasn't been controlled in the low frequencies a record with tight, articulate, bass is going to sound dense and muddy as those frequencies echo and build up in your room.
Just something to keep in mind when debating the merits of hi-res vs. a 44.1k mp3.
My "listening space" seldom exceeds an inch from my head. Either AirPods Pro or Sennheisers right in/on my ears. That's going to be the target audience of the majority of these changes.
I choose 'phones because my music taste diverges too much from my wife's to make open air play an option, if I want to maintain peace.
You're right that wearing headphones sidesteps that issue entirely. It's only an issue when there is an acoustic space for the waves to interact with.
I'd also agree that Apple's choice seems to be targeting headphone users as a result of their product ecosystem.
Interestingly, people in the other discussions are pointing out that Airpod Pros and Airpods Max are incapable of higher sample-rate audio due to their codec. So it seems for now that Apple headphone users aren't going to experience any difference and that the hi-res issue only applies to stereo systems that have the capability. But then I'd just reiterate my original point that there's functionally no benefit to hi-res audio if your listening space is working against you (which most people's rooms are).
I absolutely agree with your both posts. I would also claim that the differences between headphones is far, far greater than hi-res audio
vs high bitrate compressed audio, thus it's nearly pointless to even discuss hi-res even for headphone users.
If I read that right they claim that they can deliver "spatial" audio via headphones using a multi-channel/object-based Dolby Atmos (as opposed to a binaural recording or something that else that is mixed for two channels ahead of time)
and for years I have tried demos that are unimpressive, particularly in favorable areas such as video games. Sure, with practice you can learn "sounds like I have a head cold" means "the audio source is supposed to be above my head" but it's nothing like real life.
I invite you to test out your own "spatial audio" abilities in your environment, including:
* locating sound sources within a few degrees and pointing at them
* your ability to estimate how far away sounds are
* your ability to sense walls in your environment from the sound of your footsteps reflecting off them and not walk into them
Every "spatial audio" technique (even binaural) is a pale shadow of your ability to localize sounds in an environment and simultaneously map the sound and the space that reflects the sound around it.
What's certain is that the signal is going to get heavy processing that will damage it -- the whole point of HRTF is that the timbre of the sound is distorted by your outer ears fairly violently as a function of angle. The distortion is real, but the spatial perception isn't. (Other spatial audio tricks run into problems with coherence -- if you have two copies of the same note combined electronically or acoustically they will be in phase in some places and out of phase in other places... Just like the "speckle" you would see if you diffused a laser pointer and tried to use it like a flashlight)
> I invite you to test out your own "spatial audio" abilities in your environment, including:
* locating sound sources within a few degrees and pointing at them
I haven’t tried the other two, but with a pair of AirPods Pro and a video source that support spatial audio, this is ridiculously easy to do, and 100% accurate. I don’t know what witchcraft they’ve employed, but I can easily pick up my iPhone with my eyes closed based on where the audio is ‘coming from’.
Also, with SA turned on, because it sounds like the audio is coming from outside your head instead of from your headphones, it’s much more enjoyable to listen to even without a bunch of surround sound stuff. Things like dialog sound much more ‘normal’.
You don't have to believe it, it's been working since last October.
I understand your skepticism, but their implementation works and it's amazing.
Is it exactly like real life? Of course not. To address your points:
* Yes, you can absolutely locate sound sources within a few degrees, it's astonishingly accurate
* No, you can't really estimate sound distance. It's absolutely coming from outside your head, but all sounds like it's kind of just a generic 5 ft away or something
* Of course you can't walk around your environment blind with them, it's not trying to
You say the spatial perception isn't real, but it absolutely is. And I have no complaints about distortion -- yes obviously the waveform is different, but I perceive zero perceptual degradation in quality. It doesn't introduce any unwanted artifacts that I can notice, at least.
I highly suggest you try it with AirPods Pro and existing Apple TV+ content.
And remember, it's trying to simulate a real-life surround sound speaker setup. Not simulate real life itself. Movies aren't mastered to sound like real life, they're mastered to give a spatial audio component to the movie.
There's a questionable assumption in the HRTF article, namely that the transfer function is the same (or similar) for different people in different environments. I don't think the same HRTF would sound convincing indoors and outdoors, even. Let alone differences in ear shapes and sizes.
Sure, but commercial spatial audio is in its infancy. We’re maybe in the 1920’s if you compare it to video. So as the techniques expands and people adjust and both sides gain experience we’ll be able to compensate for the perceived shortcomings by exaggerating effectively to make it seem better than our natural spacial hearing.
To get there people have to have a clear perception of what "the gap" is between what is and what's possible -- like the error signal in a negative feedback loop.
In reality people will think a service sounds better if Dr. Dre, Jay-Z or Neil Young is behind it.
If people watch a bad orchestra playing in good clothes or they watch a good orchestra play in bad clothes they'll likely think the well dressed orchestra sounds better.
A world like that just doesn't have the capacity to improve.
Spot on about the orchestra. A chap used to know used to work for Midas and said that visuals affect perception of quality significantly. They had a problem with a digital desk where the UI was running at very slow framerates and the customer complained that it sounded terrible. If they turned around and listened without looking at the screen they thought it sounded absolutely fine - merely seeing the flickery slow framerates made them believe it SOUNDED terrible.
And you're right about the inability to improve. Try reading up above where people are arguing that they can't hear the difference between a WAV and a 128 kbps MP3....!! Either their hearing is absolutely shot or they are listening to silence.
Fair warning, any attempts in this area will have to take your individual ear shape into account to be accurate. Our brains have learned how sounds change based on the frequency changes due to our individual ear shapes, and any software that wants to emulate true spatial sound will have to take this into account.
This sounds like a very interesting project, especially if it could be done just by taking pictures of both your ears (I'm not sure if that's sufficient to capture all of the topology.) Generating a sufficiently large dataset to learn how that topology relates to sound perception sounds incredibly expensive though.
Sure, but I'd bet that accounting for a handful of shapes (maybe less than 10) could cover 90% of the differences. We've applied that principle to everything else in the body pretty well so far. It will take a good bit of time to figure out what those shapes might be though.
I have made some extremely realistic sound recording by using binaural microphones that are positioned inside my ear canals. Using my own head retains a lot of that sensory information.
* your ability to sense walls in your environment from the sound of your footsteps reflecting off them and not walk into them
I think you can actually navigate in the dark by clicking your tongue or your fingers and detect obstacles. I know some blind people actually use this echolocation to help them get around. Might be fun to try.
> Due to the large file sizes and bandwidth needed for Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless Audio, subscribers will need to opt in to the experience. Hi-Res Lossless also requires external equipment, such as a USB digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
Yeah what's the point. No APT-X means this is like watching a bluray through RCA cables. Even the Airpods Max might not even be able to drive it through the 3.5mm to lightning adapter.
AptX Adaptive (2018+) is the only one that supports 96/24 at best, so well-shielded RCA cables from a wired DAC would probably degrade the signal less than the downmix for AptX Adaptive would, assuming your devices even support AptX Adaptive.
They make that pretty clear. It's for audiophiles with the appropriate DAC and super high quality listening equipment, whether speakers or wired headphones.
I work as a developer during the day, but have my home recording setup in the same room, and listen to Apple Music (or other services) all day through that.
Bluetooth technology doesn't have the bandwidth capacity to stream lossless audio, sorry. You will be listening to a compressed stream. The only way to listen lossless is wired.
Lossless is MEANINGLESS because Bluetooth audio itself is a lossy compressed stream. How are Apple going to market lossless streaming to Airpods, when such a thing is technically impossible?
Apple aren't marketing lossless streaming to AirPods.
There are lots of hardwired devices ready to playback in hi-res via phone or Mac, surely. And AirPods Max support spatial audio already and are apparently good quality.
I would expect the future of the H1 chip's audio streaming quality to soon be much better than Bluetooth.
They aren’t marketing it to AirPods. They’re marketing the spatial audio for the AirPods. They even call out that for the highest quality lossless you need a DAC.
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 already know the answer and it only works on Apple stuff.
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.
For one thing, Apple has a custom Dolby Atmos Implementation on their headphones that ties the accelerometers in the AirPods to detect head position and then adjust sound strength to places where you turn your head. Supposedly when watching movies with Atmos or 7.1 it's incredibly immersive. They just announced their new iMac with 'Atmos' (I want to see how this works) as well however. You probably could connect over HDMI as you state.
Yup. It’s like the fact that your eyes heck all over and I believe slightly vibrate in order to sample from slightly different positions to improve image quality.
I meant to say that if you device supports Dolby Atmos then it should work. This spatial audio from Apple is just Dolby Atmos, not some special apple thing (besides being streamed via the Apple Music service).
I would think Apple TV + hdmi should do the trick. There doesn’t seem to be a technical reason this can’t be done seeing as atmos does work on Apple TV, but.... I would rather have my TV off when just having music on.
I've been also wondering the same. I have HomePods in stereo pair and have been trying to figure out how to play surround content on them that is not in the Apple ecosystem (via Apple TV).
(AirPods Pro | AirPods Max) + (Mac | iPad | iPhone) or Apple TV + HDMI. I don't think the Apple Watch + AirPods are supported unfortunately, might be due to battery/performance reasons.
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:
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.
Do you have Apple Music disabled in the Music app? I don't subscribe to apple music, and the link originally didn't work for me. After I turned "Show Apple Music" back on, the link worked.
This is incredible. It sounds like it's playing in a 3D space. I really didn't expect the difference to be noticeable to my non-audiophile ears. This is going to be a must-have feature for a lot of streaming music users.
We have some great news for you – going forward, there will be no extra charge for HD as part of your Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.
You will continue to have full access to all of your HD content, but at no additional cost. This change will be reflected in your next billing cycle.
On the business side, it's great to see Apple continue to invest in value delivery. For folks who have Apple affinity but who want lossless, this should be a no brainer. It's a much simpler (and somewhat cheaper) pricing model than streaming services with lossless/lossy tiers, which ought to pluck a few tenths of a percent of customers away from those competitors as well.
In terms of art, I'm in a kind of wait-and-see mode. Recordings have been doing simple panning for a long time. Artists already have quite a powerful set of tools for creating a soundstage, but I'm curious to see how they take advantage of an even more sophisticated medium.
At a meta level, what's interesting about this is that, although these standards can be adopted by anyone, Apple is (for now at least) basically verticalizing music production. They can pitch to artists that X% of Apple Music customers have spatial-audio-capable devices, Y% have capable headphones, and they can 'sell' the value of the additional Atmos/spatial production work as a function of a well-defined TAM rather than in a vacuum.
If the art side is actually good, fans have a reason to stay in the Apple ecosystem — to hear a better, more true-to-intent version of the music.
The crux of this is: do these features actually produce innovation in music production that artists and fans agree is a way of elevating the form? If not, it's a dud; if so, Apple has a big head start.
Was it though? Don't think a lot of people go to Spotify for the quality but rather a lot of their other features, widespread support and discovery. Will take Apple a long time to catch up on that. The people caring about quality already have a ton of options outside of Spotify.
I've given Apple Music a try a few times. Every time, I've dropped it and gone back to Spotify — not because of the audio quality or network effects or anything, but just because the Apple Music UX is so freaking terrible. I don't doubt that this will sound amazing, but that will still not overcome the UI issues.
Not sure who "we" are but many in the community do expect Apple to run all of their services as loss-leaders as currently they have a very small market share compared to Spotify et al, so not surprising to everyone at least that this was free.
Great but Apple can you please fix the awful obliteration of audio quality in your audio speed algorithms? Apple podcast app on 1.5x speed sounds like a 1950s radio underwater. MacOS and iOS. It’s so bad and makes the apps unusable for me.
I just wish Soundcloud improved their sound quality. Feed of new dj mixes from people you follow is so much better (for me) than some generic music charts.
For those who have never heard of Ambisonics, it's a surround-sound format based on taking the concept of differential stereo and extending it to three dimensions. Differential stereo is of course where instead of storing/transmitting each channel independently (as on audio cassettes or uncompressed digital audio formats like CDs) you store/transmit a sum of the two channels (L+R) and a difference (L-R) (as on vinyl records or analog FM broadcasts). Monophonic devices can just reproduce the sum channel and ignore the difference channel. Stereophonic devices can recover the two stereo channels through simple signal processing: (L+R) + (L-R) = 2L, (L+R) - (L-R) = 2R.
Ambisonics essentially asks the question of "what if we also stored a front-back and a top-bottom signal?" It turns out this is sufficient to fully represent 3D spatial audio. Additionally, unlike traditional "5.1/7.1"/etc. audio formats which assume a fixed speaker placement, digital signal processing can be used to adapt the audio to any number of speakers in any location in a space or use an HRTF to produce virtualized 3D audio for headphones.
Ambisonics had the misfortune of being invented in the 1970s before digital signal processing made the necessary audio signal processing for making practical use of it cheap and easy to implement, so inferior (but cheaper to implement) formats like Dolby Pro Logic ended up winning in both the consumer and professional spaces. From an open source perspective, though, this makes Ambisonics compelling because all of the important patents related to it should be well past their expiration by this point.
Dolby Atmos allows you to specify multiple channels together with spatial metadata. The Ambisonics support for opus is quite similar. The spec allows the encoder to specify an arbitrary matrix used for mixing of the audio. If you read Apple's blog post, it seems they use the Dolby Atmos format instead of their own homegrown solution.
Doing some reading just now, it seems Atmos is what's called an OBA (object-based audio) format. It's fundamentally lower-level than Ambisonics, which falls into the SBA (scene-based audio) category, so it should be possible to mix it down to Ambisonics. In fact I suspect the Atmos decoder does something like that on its way to creating signals for each speaker. OBA formats generally require more bandwidth than SBA formats. The benefit is that the end user can customize the mix (e.g. mute certain sources). In the case where there are many mutually-exclusive objects (e.g. dialog in different languages), the bandwidth advantage of SBA diminishes...
Maybe there is no first-class support in the main opus encoder for object based audio, but as I've said above you can encode arbitrary matrices, so you can encode arbitrary positions for channels. That's enough for stationary objects. Moving objects, I'm not sure if Atmos supports them, can't be encoded in a single opus stream, however one can chain multiple opus streams after another. I don't think you need high time resolution for moving objects, something like one stream per 100ms should be enough, 10 per second. So in theory, opus can get get very close to object based audio, even if the encoder right now only does ambisonics.
Curious if this will be available on Windows and macOS when using a Dolby-capable receiver. It seems to be AirPod-only from the press release itself?
Also curious if this will at some point also apply to Apple iTunes Match (the precursor to Apple Music) which lets you own rather than “rent” your music.
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?
The one thing that bothers me about this is that it's still really hard to get high-quality audio to a high-quality speaker. Apple doesn't currently offer a first-party way to stream to a third-party speaker; you have to buy a homepod, find a used Apple AirPort Express Audio, or rely on a third-party airplay streaming device. I'm sure there are a bunch of high-quality third-party airplay devices, but the lack of a device from Apple directly makes me worried about relying on AirPlay Audio being a thing in the future.
Its too bad that Sony - among others - have been doing their own interpretation of this for a long time, but don:t have the marketing budget or presence of mind in the broader market for people to notice. The Apple machine (i use an iPhone and M1 mini - love them) is just so OP
I think that's pretty typical in the world of audio in general. The average consumer has to do some fairly extensive digging in order to really understand what is available to them product and feature wise. What's new, what's old, etc.. And the info is almost always through third party reviewers.
I'm not so sure more marketing dollars would change that. Apple has the uncanny ability to generate immense amounts of buzz whenever they announce something.
Sony and the other Japanese companies have been busy committing audio crimes by claiming their products are "Hi-Res Audio certified", which means nothing except they want you to replace everything, so you shouldn't encourage them.
You would notice that the main difference between lossy and lossless formats is that lossless format keeps all of the stuff while lossy formats partially or wholly drop 20kHz+ if you compare with the spectrogram of them.
And there are good reasons to listen to lossy ones instead of lossless ones, you probably can't hear 20kHz+ sound but it will reduce your headroom if it's there, this especially matters when you play it in high volume because the vibration of the 20kHz+ sound cause could cause audio distortion. MQA is the proprietary audio encoding which deals with such problem, although it seems to be a bit debatable.
Lossless formats are especially important for music storage/archive/remixing. But I really can't hear the difference between opus-128k (vbr), mp3-320k (vbr/cbr) and lossless ones.
I just encode lossless music to opus 128k to listen to when it's possible. opus is a very decent audio format, it's wildly used for VoIP. I wouldn't go any higher than 128k for opus because it's recommended in Opus wiki[1], and I've compared the spectrogram between opus 128k (VBR) and mp3 320k (CBR) and there are only very a few of differences.
Semi-worth pointing out that Google has done a couple spatial audio/ambisonics things over the years. The seemingly-abandoned VR initiative has/had spatial audio[1], provided by the open source Resonance Audio[2] library they open sourced, Omnitone for spatial audio on the web[3]. Omnitone dates back to 2016[4]!
Not nearly the follow through/uptake. As usual I part blame Google, but in large part, it's just hard to get adoption of good tech!! Both from consumers, but more so, the 3rd party software market.
In general, I'm more excited for computational audio's potential to combine let's say "ad hoc" arrangements of speakers, for it's ability to acoustically map out rooms & deliberately create sound fields, than I am these kind of top down, high control systems like Atmos or VR where a heavily constrained, normalized set of speakers is used to recreate one specific audio experience. It feels like we're at 3D VR concert again, where you get to stand in one spot & look around. Immersive, so long as you are ok taking the role of a frozen obelisk in the scene.
Spatial audio has been around since at least the 90s. More recently, Bose has been pushing their "AR" eyewear which is sunglasses with tiny speakers and an IMU.
(I originally posted a reply that remarked that we can buy Apple Lossless music from iTMS - however I did a quick check and to my surprise Apple still doesn't offer DRM-free lossless content on iTMS: you can only get Apple Lossless by ripping your own CDs. The "Apple Digital Masters" products are not actually "masters": they're still compressed with lossy encoding: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/7/20758633/apple-digital-mas... - I guess this explains why services like Tidal and Pono are still around.
Knowing Apple, I think they probably wanted to offer lossless but the record companies are still paranoid about lossless copies... philistines.
> Knowing Apple, I think they probably wanted to offer lossless but the record companies are still paranoid about lossless copies... philistines.
You can buy digital lossless audio files on countless stores. Sure, iTunes is a different scale compared to Bandcamp, but buying lossless digital audio files isn't exactly new.
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.
Apple has the digital music "selling" device, which is called iTune music. This complain is more like go to avis and complain they only rent cars but not selling them.
You can still “buy” albums digitally from Apple, and they are lossless, as they have been for almost-ever. The caveat being that you need a device capable of decoding ALAC files.
They have allowed you to rip your own music to lossless for more than 15 years, but I only just found out that when using iTunes Match, they cheat and only store a high-resolution but lossy version on their service.
> By default, Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, as well as the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
What does it mean to have spatial audio on a pair of headphones? I thought spatial audio meant you needed a 5 speaker setup or similar.
Not necessarily, but for the best effects yes. You can use head related transfer functions (HRTFs) to simulate spatial audio with just one driver per ear. Granted the effects aren’t as significant as multi-driver setups, I was able to get a convincing spatial audio demo working with in-ear devices for an Audio Tech course project back in school.
Spacial Audio is the name of an Apple feature avaiable when using their headphones with an iPhone/iPad. It using "head tracking" so when you move or turn your head it changes the sound to make it seem like you are moving around a room with surround sound.
Likely they are releasing a set of airpods soon with a kind of head-tracked positional audio. The pro and max can already do positional audio where the sound seems to be coming from a paired iPad no matter how you twist your head.
Dynamic range in audio matters only if you actually have some. It's absolutely possible to have 16/24 or more bits of dynamic range available but have the music be pushed so hot as to not use more than a few actual bits. The test you linked is just an example of such music. Regardless, it's easily discernible, as the loudness is not matched between the test samples. I don't even need to listen more than 0.5s to get to 99.95% confidence.
Does anyone have any idea how spatial audio will work orientation-wise with music?
Existing spatial audio on iOS+AirPods puts the center channel (dialog) coming from your device, which makes sense since you're actively looking at it.
But I listen to music while walking around the house. I'm constantly changing orientation.
Does this mean the center channel will always be directly in front of me and therefore the "band" will always be moving/panning with me?
That seems like it would destroy a big part of the spatial audio appeal in movies, that the sound stays in the same physical location when you move your head. But if they don't, how do they decide where the sound comes from?
> Existing spatial audio on iOS+AirPods puts the center channel (dialog) coming from your device, which makes sense since you're actively looking at it
It doesn't do this directly. It resets the center when you keep your head still. Your head stays still when you're watching a video on your phone, so it sets the center to where your phone is. Try looking away from your phone after it centers the audio on your phone. After a few seconds, you'll hear the center "move" to where you're currently looking.
It would be nice to see broader surround sound support in browsers. It’s odd how phones and a $150 Apple TV can play surround/Atmos effortlessly, yet so many compatibility issues exist in the browser/desktop devices.
I have been loyal to Spotify for almost a decade now as a paying customer. But they cannot even fix a bug on CarPlay with large playlists or improve their navigation in CarPlay to search playlists with text input. Loads of European cars have a text input mechanism (not touchscreen). Better yet, why not a voice search capability? I am tired of asking for simple app navigation features that should be no-brainers. I don’t know what Spotify is working on, everything feels like a second thought for the last few years. But this news from Apple makes me want to jump ship.
I want to like Spotify, but their recent Mac OS app update (also Windows) has made the entire thing a pain in the ass to use. There is no search box anymore, I need to fucking click on the search menu item first. And when you look at an artist's page you no longer see their albums with songs, you know, that which makes it easy to find a song whose name you've forgotten and when you don't know in which album it is...
Apparently this took them a few year to get out.
I also wonder what the fuck they're doing over there. It really feels like they have like 2 junior developers working for them.
It's weird, the only reason I can't use Apple Music is because it doesn't sync between devices. Apple being the company it is, it's just crazy to me that I can't pickup listening where I left off on my phone once I open my laptop.
Aside: Also there's a ton of bugs, very poor job on the QA side of Apple Music
Spotify has designed this feature amazingly. Sometimes, I wonder why companies don't steal good ideas from each other more often, it seems like Apple has just refused to implement this terrific user experience.
Here is a dance music track originally mixed in 5th order ambisonics, decoded to a dolby atmos "bed" that you can try with the airpod pros. The audio has lost some fidelity and it would be better to mix direct to atmos in this case. I look forward to hearing some professional atmos mixes on apple music when this launches!
How does the head tracking work if you're just out and about, jogging or what have you? Are you going to be pointed the wrong way or does it slowly recenter or something?
I've been in the high-end audio world for over ten years now and I gotta say: it's really cool to see Apple finally offering lossless audio! I wonder if this will finally push Spotify and others to offer lossless streaming?
Spatial audio looks... gimmicky? Surround sound recordings have been available to consumers for over fifty years, yet they remain niche. I'm biased though as I've only purchased high-end stereo headphones.
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.
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 library that I painstakingly downloaded earlier that day.
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.
Reading the comments on this (on macrumors and Reddit as well) has been funny. Some people seem thrilled with the quality options. Others point out that the difference is indiscernible without xyz equipment. Anywho, this seems objectively better than what spotify and tidal are offering, and is free. I’m happy with that. Very excited for the spatial audio in music. The way it works in video is mind blowing.
> This means Apple Music subscribers will be able to hear the exact same thing that the artists created in the studio.
They really meant, "able to hear the exact same recording that the artists created in the studio." They didn't mean, "able to hear the exact same music that the artists created in the studio."
But even this isn't true. Many people can't hear the entire range of a recording, anyway.
> By default, Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or W1 chip, as well as the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Apple TV seems oddly missing in that list.
Edit: If anything is to be expected to be connected to a surround Atmos setup, it would be a TV-room audio-setup.
The fine print seems to have a slightly different story by my reading:
“How can I listen to Dolby Atmos music?
All Apple Music subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV can listen to thousands of Dolby Atmos music tracks using any headphones (emphasis mine). When you listen with compatible Apple or Beats headphones, Dolby Atmos music plays back automatically when available for a song. For other headphones, go to Settings > Music > Audio and set Dolby Atmos to Always On. You can also hear Dolby Atmos music using the built‑in speakers on a compatible iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, or HomePod, or by connecting your Apple TV 4K to a compatible TV or audiovisual receiver.”
It's interesting to me that they announce a high-end audio feature a month after they discontinue their high-end speakers. I realize the big HomePod wasn't selling well, but it seems like they should have a decent Apple speaker.
Apple TV doesn’t have speakers. The device sending audio digitally to another device (an actual TV or sound bar in this case) wouldn’t need one, the device driving the speakers would need one.
Because they can't guarantee the Apple TV is hooked up to Atmos capable speakers. With the headphones and built-in speakers they know they can fake Atmos. Not so on a random TV.
Yes! But they can't say it will play Atmos BY DEFAULT when they can't guarantee the speakers/receiver support Atmos. On their headphones speakers they can.
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 with surround channels and then an technology that plays it back through two speakers using an IMU so you can turn your head and hear different stuff. In reality, it's probably a BS effect... somebody, please reply if you actually know. (Not guess, actually know. Futile, I know -- I'm going to get lots of guesses as replies because that's what always happens on HN.)
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 positioned at a point in space, and your receiver or device figures out which speakers to use to present it. Your audio file says “play A 10’ left of the listener, play B 10’ right of the user.”
My Sony headphones came with "360 Reality Audio" and I honestly cannot tell the difference with it on/off. Always the same with audio and without hearing this I can already tell that I won't be able to tell the difference.
When is Spatial Audio just going to be the default across iOS? All interface sounds and media.
Also how much of the Apple Music library is actually spatial audio? It’s not a great experience when only a subset of videos have the full experience for example
Wouldn't lossless Audio need to be some kind of analog? Or some fourier transformations? Isn't the quantization of digital already a loss over the continous nature of sounds? I have no clue about audio.
In this context, lossless just means "the same quality as it was originally recorded in, which is sufficiently high for all practical purposes". And since our hearing only goes up to 20kHz, if you record at a sample rate of 44.1kHz -- just above the Nyquist frequency -- you'll be able to faithfully reproduce the original audio to within the precision afforded by your bit depth (generally 16 or 24 bit). Sort of like how a RAW image is considered lossless because it contains every single pixel captured, even though it can only represent finitely many distinct colors and cannot zoom in infinitely far with no degradation.
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.
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.
I understand that the lossless part is only the compression from the original digital file: what you play is bit by bit what the publisher uploaded. Just like BMP vs JPEG. Not about maintaining the analog resolution.
A good upgrade would be putting carpets everywhere or setting up your smart home so you can turn off the fridge so the compressor sound won't interfere with your speakers.
I sure hope spatial audio won't be the only way music will be delivered in the future. It'd be a complete nightmare for people like me who has severely impaired hearing on one ear.
Wouldn't that also apply to mono v stereo? I would guess that if you had one earphone in, they would fallback to a mono/stereo mix. It kinda works like that currently with AirPods. If you take out one, instead of only getting one channel through the remaining AirPod, you get both channels diverted to the one AirPod.
the question here is: how to convert the current songs to the atmos format. For now we have few artists with the standard, but it’s almost mandatory to have the whole catalog if they want to make it popular
I think iTunes is effectively legacy at this point in favour of the web app (music.apple.com), which works far better (except for lack of offline downloads) and supports windows multimedia keys.
I thought most people would be listening to their own curated collection of mostly Bandcamp stuff, plus a bunch of exclusive vinyl and cassette releases. I didn’t realize that older folks (i.e. over 35) are still using services like Spotify and Apple Music!
It's astounding how a little bit of convenience gets people to abandon their habits and forgo their rights to own things. While at the same time pushing artists into zero-income servitude to the algorithm.
While in modern music I do not remember songs with impressive stereo effects, most of the albums that I was listening when I was young, both rock music albums and classical music albums, were severely degraded when listened in mono.
Name an example, and name the effect that was significant enough to the upshot of the song that mixing the stereo channels down to a single mono channel would lose prime information for the listener.
I'm not saying there aren't examples, but I want to listen directly to an example you would consider severely degraded if heard in mono (i.e., stereo channels mixed down to mono and then just copied to two channels).
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!
Going further with another Beatles tune-- listen to the mono mix of "Helter Skelter" and tell me what in the first 10 seconds clues you in to the fact that a) it was recorded in 1968 and b) that it's even in mono! And don't cheat by comparing it to the stereo version.
In any case-- compare that experience to video recording/playback quality. I can't even show digital videos recorded in, say, 2004, to a young audience because the general quality is already considered complete crap. My own confirmation bias can't even fill in the rift. Standard DV stuff from that era-- even if it's something I care deeply about-- simply looks blurry to me now.
The funny thing to me is that silicon valley still markets improvements in audio fidelity/spatialization as if they are the same qualitative jumps in quality as video improvements. Ok, I get it that VR probably necessitates sounds emanating from behind your head. Fine. But generally speaking there is a ton of hype around audio that simply isn't warranted, at least for a consumer or even prosumer audience. It's not blockchain-level hype, but still...
So they're bringing spatial audio, a live-performance gimmick that is nearly impossible to accomplish with headphones, and lossless audio, a quality improvement undetectable by the human ear, and completely negated by bluetooth transmission...
Sounds like they're bringing nothing but more data consumption to the table.
Wow lossless audio, I was shocked when I tried an iphone 12 that itunes, imusic, music app whatever you call it did not nativelt support OGG/lossless format.
>Apple Music will also make its catalog of more than 75 million songs available in Lossless Audio. Apple uses ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) to preserve every single bit of the original audio file.
> Apple Music will also make its catalog of more than 75 million songs available in Lossless Audio. Apple uses ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) to preserve every single bit of the original audio file.
Apple now optimize their hardware for playback of ALAC. If they went with FLAC, they would probably optimize their hardware for FLAC instead, meaning others could also take advantage of their optimizations.
But that's exactly why they went with their own format, so they can claim it's more battery efficient or something, compared to others who use open standards but the hardware is not optimized for it.
It‘s ALAC, but more interestingly with optional ridiculously high sample rate of 196 kHz. I‘m not sure if the setting for that is up to the listener or up to the publisher.
No, it's not sad that Apple is using an open source codec, it's sad that Apple specifically created ALAC instead of just using FLAC that already exists. 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. Fine, probably makes business-sense, but as someone who was brought up with the mindset of an open internet and web, it's sad to see Apple continue to fight against open standards.
Friendly reminder of the site guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Specifically, I never said I'm sad that Apple is using an open source codec. I specifically said I'm sad that they are using ALAC instead of the already existing open standards.
>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 does linux.
iPhones have supported FLAC natively since 2017. There's apps that play back FLAC files in the App Store.
So, overall, I don't see what's sad about it. Apple Music is a subscription service that's streaming DRM protected music. Whether it's FLAC or ALAC doesn't make a difference to the user.
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 thing, Apple prefers to invent their own format, that they can change at their own whim and that they now can optimize their hardware for, so they get an advantage no one else can use.
You don't see anything bad in this? Are you really arguing against open standards? I thought we went through this with the internet and the web already, and open standards is something people generally prefer. It just ends up better for everyone, instead of companies inventing their own formats time and time again, especially when a format that suits their needs already exists...
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.
To be clear, despite the headline, the existence of Lossless Audio (which I know under the FLAC codec, but Apple uses ALAC—I don't know how they're related) isn't new; it's just that Apple is now serving everything in its catalogue encoded that way. The actual title is:
> Apple Music announces Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos; will bring Lossless Audio to entire catalog
Since most of the music is consumed on headphones, I'm not sure if spatial music will appeal to many. What I would really like to see in purchased music is individual soundtracks for each instrument/vocal (which I can mix as per my taste) and one default mix made as per the producer's taste.
This would not only help with music practice, karaoke,
You can make spatial audio work with headphones, as those various fun YouTube demos show. Furthermore Apple's headphones have support for it including directional audio support. If you haven't tried it it's pretty spectacular, with the only downside being the sound so convincingly seems to be coming from my iPad I need to verify that I am in fact sending the audio to my airpods.
The BBC has produced a number of 3D recordings ("binaural sound") of classical music performances. These recordings are designed for headphones. You can try them out here (requires sign-in to play):
> Since most of the music is consumed on headphones, I'm not sure if spatial music will appeal to many
The spatial sound implementation on the EarPods pro is amazing. When I first tried them with my iPad I had to take them off several times to make sure the sound was coming from the headphones. I can only assume this will be as good.
But, is it a value in itself to reproduce the original sound perfectly? What if the processed sound is better?
When you listen to an LP you can hear cracks and pops. But when you sit in a concert-hall you can hear people coughing. You can sometimes hear people talking.
You can hear reverberation of the hall, that is not natural is it? It does not come from the players' instruments.
How much enjoyment does it take away from you if the music is not absolutely perfectly rendered the way it sounded in the concert hall?
At home when you listen to your super-stereoes you can hear sounds from the building, sounds from the street and sound of the wind and rain. Does it kill your enjoyment?
> 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, as the inaudible loss of quality with minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) is audible when the sound is sped up or slowed down.
But, and this the article does not mention, is not what Apple Music wants you to do. The formats will be proprietary with DRM.
I prefer FLAC/OggVorbis/etc when it comes to music. But then I like to be able to mix/remix.