Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
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apple.com
> 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.
On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests.
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.
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).
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.
--
[0] - https://xkcd.com/1015/
It's like with kerning
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yups. Me too. Even with cheap professional equipment I cannot hear the difference of lossless vs >= 192kbps MP3.
> anything above that is wasted space.
Unless you want to mix/remix/etc. Changing the pitch brings out the artifacts.
Certainly, you probably need lossless if you're going to do any sort of editing.
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.
This Wikipedia article about loudness wars explains the problem in details. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
You can't 'uncompress' an MP3 back to having the dynamic range it had before.
Because I don't think we can.
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.
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.
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.
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 can't see any reason for 128kbs service unless you're absolutely starved for data. There is no other advantage.
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.
You're only making that problem even worse by offering a low quality, even lower price model.
Frankly I can't imagine there would be many artists particularly happy with having huge swathes of people introduced to their music at 128kbs.
If you control the client and are able to update it, I think you're better off switching to opus or similar.
96kbps opus is actually quite good for music already: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus#Music_encod...
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.
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.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/abx-test-of-320kbps-vs-flac-...
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.)
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.
That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree that it is probably possible in theory, but aren't we talking about actual equipment and recordings that people can buy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s
I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.
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.
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.
Do you happen to have a citation for when this changed? According to the "Apple Digital Masters" Technology Brief[1], the masters delivered to Apple have historically been AAC files.
[1] https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf
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.
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.
Apple Digital Masters Droplet
You can use the Apple Digital Masters Droplet to automate the creation of 256 kbps 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.
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:
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M
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.
I'm personally baffled and irritated by this move from Apple. They'll be selling healing crystals next.
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.
Are there likely to be real-world cases where this happens - and the effect is detrimental enough to actually matter to anyone?
Surely we're debating "when is it good enough for anyone sane and reasonable?" not "when could a hypothetical oracle be fooled 100%"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
24kpbs is perfectly adequate for voice/podcasts/audiobooks
http://www.lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-white-paper-the_o...
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.
And even if I could detect the difference, I am not convinced that the improvement in bitrate would actually result in any increased enjoyment.
4/6 with two errors where I confused 320Kbps and raw wav.
But to be honest, I could hardly distinguish between the samples and I mostly guessed.
If you think you can really hear fine differences in audio, it can be very eye opening (ear opening?).
As far as I know, the goto test is: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/
They have a few other tests heres: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html
It compares FLAC with 320 Kbps AAC which no streaming service uses (Apple uses 256 Kbps) and is a very high bit rate.
And its choice of indie tracks isn't suited for demonstrating codec artefacts. At least have classical, EDM etc as well.
The guy who made it, jaakkopasanen, is also the author of other great audio tools - AutoEQ and Impulcifer.
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.
I do collect lossless audio for archival reasons and the ability to convert from a non lossy source.
I believe that high bitrate audio is entirely bullshit though- as Chris Montgomery has shown:
Based on the opening part of that video, I think you must have meant to say high sampling rate.
If you're comparing against lossless, sounding different means sounding worse.
The goal is transparency: Preserving the qualities of the original audio that you can actually hear, while occupying less space.
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.
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!"
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.
On the tests at: "https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_frequency.php?frq=14" I can get 10/10 on the 10khz and 11khz test, 9/10 on the 12khz test and then it's just guessing at 13khz and higher.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It is a bit lengthy, takes 5-10m, but it is a true blind A/B test with enough samples to be significant.
I'm using WH-1000XM3 headphones and am a lifelong musician with pretty mild tinnitus.
Listened using Beyerdynamic Custom Studios with a cheap-ish DAC on a windows PC.
I did have aptX enabled at some point in Macos, not sure if it's still working.
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?
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.
Not "even" as if that was any good. MP3 320kbps is a very low bar.
OPUS vbr averaging 128kbps is much harder than mp3 320kbps to ABX against FLAC.
MP3 simply is a really bad codec by current standards.
They are called _Compact Discs_ and you can get them pretty cheap these days!
It's the more esoteric artists that have become increasingly difficult to get CDs for. Streaming is really a boon for anything outside the mainstream.
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.
Source: I totally still do that with my CD collection.
I hear what you're saying, but the convenience of a vast and portable library is compelling.
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 guess there are many reasons for this, but mainly I guess they are simply victims of copyright.
I can format it to MP3, or ALAC, of FLAC, or whatever I like, and I can play them on devices that are made today, or 40 years ago.
But secretly I just use Spotify for it’s discover features, and then buy CDs of the albums I like.
Spotify isn't going anywhere.
Also, all the people holding onto their 8-tracks are definitely thinking they showed all of us. /s
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.
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).
Also, I’m aware SACDs exists. I actually have an amp that can decode DSD encoded audio but I failed to hear a difference.
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.
That's why we don't use that definition.
Yes, if you blast humans with enough energy in any form they will eventually notice. This is not a relevant result for music.
Because from all accounts it is a myth.
Sensitivity to audio falls off a cliff as you approach 20KHz.
Especially if your hearing has been damaged by repeat exposure to 19 kHz at 138dB SPL.
From all accounts? Don't you mean from one account?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
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.
True. No one else bothers with it though, because why should they when FLAC exists? That makes ALAC, in practice, largely an Apple-only format.
(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.)
Well if you want to try Nix, https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9dba669e8a53f00114b53d... right out of the box :D
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.
Except adoption. FLAC is much more widely supported, so why opt for ALAC?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Spotify currently uses Ogg Vorbis on desktop and mobile, and AAC for the web player.
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!
"Good enough" can be the enemy of "correct".
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.
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.
I agree, although arguably the MP3 "core format" has had a number of extensions around so many things that ultimately became de facto standards (vendor extensions if you will). I remember how you could not have precise seeking or current time display with VBR, which now seems to be now largely a solved problem.
> There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support
One of these is LAME adding gapless stuff at least as far back as 2003, so yes it's a workaround to a format limitation, but it's quite an old one, and fairly stable and known well enough that it's been a while since encoders default to encode with gapless metadata.
There's an interesting historical explanation here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2
I do agree though that the easy path out of it is to just stop using MP3, for this reason and a zillion others ;)
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.
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.
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.
This was referring to brand perceptions, not the Android or iOS software platforms.
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.
And about people getting used to compression artifacts: https://web.archive.org/web/20090315092806/radar.oreilly.com... and https://gizmodo.com/ipods-and-young-people-have-utterly-dest...
Translated article: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=27324.0
Umm did I miss something? ...This for a music streaming service.
I tbh think "sound(s) bigger and stronger" is actually a pretty decent layman's phrase for "has a higher dynamic range".
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.
I just wish digital audio players would pick it up.
Indeed, here is such a test: https://gxip23wuyntw2qbzp2f7yfke6y-ac5fdsxevxq4s5y-www-heise...
Even trained listeners using high-end equipment weren’t able to distinguish between CD and 256 kbps MP3 in double-blind tests.
Much better results would be had with 1 month of A, then switching to B.
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.
That Scoopertino post never fails to amuse me.
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-what-if-apple-m...
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.
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.
Bigger. Stronger. Warmer. Not that these cannot meaningfully describe audio. But it tells me they cannot quantify the difference.
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.
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.
This just seems like a waste of bandwidth for streaming though.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
[2] https://pasteboard.co/K2keFBV.png One song pulled out into a greatest hits compilation and duplicated
[3] https://pasteboard.co/K2kfc0b.png All tracks, except 1, removed. The album still exists in Apple Music.
[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.
[...and many more]
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".
But I’ve not thought twice about it in several years.
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.
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.
Thanks for the response.
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.
I haven't. I'll check them out now :-)
> Interestingly you may have a harder time finding very popular mainstream music in a lossless format.
Oh I don't care about those things, actually. It's more availability and cost.
I wish Apple would provide an API that can upload to iCloud Music Library
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.
Maybe time to give Plex a try for this.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
These were rich, music-minded communities focused entirely on music.
They were made up of people who went against great friction to discuss artistic works with others willing to do the same.
I've paid for Apple Music since the onset and it has never come close to the weekly top seeded albums of these communities.
They could have open-sourced the whole thing, put a paid API endpoint on in, and kept on.
Just curious, looking for them, I see this:
[1] seems ok here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/yung-gravity-ep/1500799523
Is there another version of it on AM?
[2] I can't find on Apple Music - I'm guessing it's also an upload from your library?
[3] seems ok here: https://music.apple.com/us/album/outrun/1440873249
[4] Does deluxe version have more or different tracks? I see explicit and normal version, but they seem to have same tracklist? https://music.apple.com/us/album/camp/1450829373
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.
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.
Not the artists I listen to. They're all signed with big labels, thus you can only buy from that label.
> Buying CDs and records used, then posting them on social media is a form of social currency
And criminal currency known as Copyright Infringement. I'll pass.
I edited the post, as I meant promoting the artist by posting photos or why you love the music, and not posting the music itself.
Alright, THAT makes more sense ;-)
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.
I'm saying we turn our heads regularly, so the Spatial audio works well most of the time.
The argument that Spatial Audio makes more tiny adjustments is an argument against Spatial Audio, not an argument for it.
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.
But first, back in 1972, there was Quadrophonic. Twice as good as stereo!
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.
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.
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.
Force Touch.
I still miss force touch on keyboard to move cursor around (instead of pressing spacebar, holding it and waiting)
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.)
It’s a pity that Apple doesn’t provide that feature as a simple option that one can apply to any audio source.
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.
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.
That's what transparency mode is for. You can hear each other perfectly.
You don't need noise cancellation as much when you're at home. It's more for the subway, planes, etc.
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.
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.
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.
A VR headset is the only solution I'm aware of that is full-brightness, zero-ghosting.
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.
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.
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.
And there are still a ton -- heck, there's a checkbox built-in in VLC under Audio Effects > Filter > Headphone virtualization.
But none of them that I've tried come anywhere close to what Apple has done. I don't know why.
However, there is an official Dolby Atmos Surround Sound effect for Windows 10:
https://www.howtogeek.com/309853/how-to-use-dolby-atmos-surr...
I've never tried it, but if anything currently competes decently with Apple's version, that might be it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc -- Critque of MQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZ5hDzQ5Jg -- in defense of MQA
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.
Other than playlists, it feels more difficult to discover new music on Spotify than on Tidal.
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.
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.
That's not entirely accurate. Amazon Music (unlimited) and Spotify catalogs are approximately same.
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.
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.
So they will stream some DRM-ed wav files ?
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.
For both Spotify and Apple Music, I stream at "normal" quality, but download at "high" quality. I'm sure those options will extend to lossless.
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.
So it's not just Windows version.
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..
"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."
Not really interested.
I do agree that their landing page is pretty lacking.
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!
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'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?!
> 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. :/
https://www.imore.com/airpods-max-dont-support-apple-musics-...
If this is a codec issue as the article indicates is there any potential for a software fix?
But not being able to be tethered without using a digital to analog to digital adapter is so silly. Come on apple.
That's a pretty big miss. At the very least I would have expected them to include some large buffer to allow wireless playback.
I believe that the APMs were held back a long time from release. I had thought they were a year late.
If that's true, then it would make more sense that a plan for supporting lossless wouldn't be included.
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!
I started using Apple Music because Spotify’s attempts to ruin podcasts by making them exclusive to their platform irritated me.
Discover weekly is a really great thing though and Apple Music’s stuff isn’t as good.
However I do find that both services largely recommend the same music to me. They just have different mechanisms of surfacing it.
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.
Hard to take artists demands to be paid better seriously when they keep agreeing to things like this.
Honestly they are their own worst enemy at times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
For years there has been talk about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
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
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)
To be fair I haven't tried one of those systems, but few people ever have and few people ever will because:
1. It's a hassle to measure your ears
2. All the problems with distortion wrecking timbre will still be there.
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.
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.
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’.
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
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.
Personally I find the horizontal angle localisation excellent - vertical is slightly hit and miss.
But it probably depends on the person, too - HRTF models assume an "average" head
* your ability to sense walls in your environment from the sound of your footsteps reflecting off them and not walk into them
Wondering what's the point, then.
> 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).
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.
I don't think we're in the majority, though.
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.
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.
[0]https://professional.dolby.com/tv/dolby-atmos-for-mobile-dev...
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.
It's just that our consciousness ignores these little movements and so we think we're largely still.
One of the standard stare-at-the-dot-machine optometry tests is enough to make my vision start to gray out.
https://music.apple.com/gb/music-movie/spatial-audio-on-appl...
It’s like they’re warning me the problems with walled gardens.
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.
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.
If anything it probably would totally kill Tidal.
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.
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.
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?
Sony 360 Reality Audio https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/what-is-sony-360-reality-au...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://developers.google.com/vr/discover/spatial-audio
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWbaEr_mXRE
[3] https://googlechrome.github.io/omnitone/
[4] https://audioxpress.com/article/google-discovers-ambisonics-...
https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/smart_products/sp_frames...
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.
Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So let me rephrase: I'm often listening to music while constantly turning, like prepping in the kitchen, vacuuming the house, etc.
Movies can rely on you looking at the screen and figuring out your orientation. If you're actively moving about, what will the music's orientation be?
Maybe a bit like this (campy, I know): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgeFdOayeaw
Drives me nuts that Spotify's works so well and Apple Music (by the company that invented handoff) doesn't have it at all.
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.
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.
Still, I prefer Apple Music's album-focused library to Spotify's playlist-focused approach.
https://twitter.com/olilarkin/status/1353171949204221953?s=2...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit 2: Confirmed supported.
Why shouldn’t it work for music too?
“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.”
Great. That’s all I needed to hear.
I wonder why they made so basic information so hard to obtain.
I even searched the page simply for “TV” looking for that and couldn’t find it.
Nonsense. Apple TV supports Dolby Atmos and can detect a compatible receiver/speaker when connected.
iTunes on Apple TV offers hundreds of movies with Atmos-audio after all.
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.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos says it's a format that stores up to 128 audio channels with 3d spatial information for each. Pretty cool!
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
Be careful with your data plan :)
https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/6/9680140/chris-montgomery-...
Technically, our hearing plays no role in this, the requirement is just preserving the same sampling rate and dynamic range.
†NB: industrial standard is preparing a master pack of different files from the same final render, including lossy mp3.
As far as I know, none of Apple's first-party headphones support more than 256 kbit/s AAC.
Wow, I can finally justify upgrading my iPhone charging cable to gold plated, low-oxygen wires.
Maybe, in the same way we've seen artists go back and remaster entire collections, we will see them do something similar for atoms?
The pros / geeks are having more influence on Apple's product strategy.
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!
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'm asking because I literally want to listen to it in a mono context and experience what bad things happen as a result.
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/inside-track-sgt-pep...
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...
Absolutely fucking garbage.
Sounds like they're bringing nothing but more data consumption to the table.
iTunes used too, I know the old iPods used too.
I suspect quite a few people use ALAC.
You can play them in other apps like Safari and Files.
I'm also shocked on the apple ecosystem how you load files onto an individual app in itunes/that folder in Finder for the iphone/ipad.
Well, I guess not really shocked, it is Apple.
Edit: Seems they are using their own format ALAC, sad but not surprising
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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...
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.
> Apple Music announces Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos; will bring Lossless Audio to entire catalog
This would not only help with music practice, karaoke,
BBC Philharmonic binaural recordings:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/experience-classical-bbc-philh...
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.
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?