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Apple lossless official announcement

Descartes

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Having seen Amir's reviews of hi-res files hi-res equals trouble! Having listened to many hi-res and sacd albums the last 10 years I don't think hi-res is worth the extra bandwidth. A well recorded CD 16b 44.1k album perfectly does the job! But maybe 24b 48k is the perfect trade off between sound quality and bandwidth...

Only interested in multichannel music on SACSX looking forward to ATMOS music!
 

Zensō

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Same here, never owned anything Apple AFAIR. Computer wise i started on PC/Windoz but went Linux around 2000 and never looked back.
I began a career in graphic design in 1995. Back in the day there was no question you’d be on a Mac if you were in graphics. Got into computer music early on and it was the same situation; everything was on the Mac. I use a Windows computer now and again for work, but I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for a very long time, it’s definitely my comfort zone.
 

eriksson

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Question:
Does one need Apple device to use it's music service?
Currently quite happy with Deezer, the "hifi" package offers download of music for playing offline, and that's my primary use these days. I guess to get something similar from Apple I would need Iphone?
 

Zensō

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Question:
Does one need Apple device to use it's music service?
Currently quite happy with Deezer, the "hifi" package offers download of music for playing offline, and that's my primary use these days. I guess to get something similar from Apple I would need Iphone?
Because of their recent shift to focusing more on services, Apple has opened up many of their services—including Apple Music—to other platforms. Here’s an overview: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-apple-music-tv-icloud-android-windows/
 

A Surfer

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Apple took one shot across the bow and took out two major streaming services Spotify and tidal.
I hope that you're wrong, I can't stand Apple cultism. At the end of the day Tidal and Apple compared in level matched, blind listening tests will sound the same. Are people really expecting audible differences? Tidal has a great catalogue (far from perfect) and why on earth would anybody celebrate less choice in a consumer market? Makes no sense to me.
 

StevenEleven

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Credit to Tidal for getting the ball rolling in terms of exploring the market for lossless (or near-lossless) streaming. But as of late Tidal has perhaps made its own bed with some iffy decisions and has only one or two percent market share in the music streaming biz last time I checked.

Trying out the revamped Apple Music now on Apple TV and IPad today. Gapless is smooth. I like the browse sub-menu with many dozens of music categories. The new release classical music playlists seem carefully curated. Each track song has a sub-menu to take you to the album containing the song or a station based on the song, or add it to a playlist or your library or to indicate if you like it. It also includes easy access to FM and Internet radio stations, and shows lyrics for many songs. You also get ITunes Match with Apple Music, where it will, among other things, upload for streaming any music in my home music library it can’t match in the Apple online streaming catalog. So, many improvements, and quite a strong music service from Apple now, IMHO.

I think Spotify can survive this, maybe somewhat diminished, and improve and compete. For example, I’ll keep Spotify because it feeds my family of five avid music consumers in a platform-agnostic way across Linux, iOS, Apple OS, Android, Windows, Fire TV, etc.
 
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StevenEleven

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Because of their recent shift to focusing more on services, Apple has opened up many of their services—including Apple Music—to other platforms. Here’s an overview: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-apple-music-tv-icloud-android-windows/

Good article—thanks!

True story—Wired just now wanted my email address to read this article on its website. But I get Wired through my Apple News subscription. So I hopped on over to Apple News and read it without giving up my email address to Wired. :) And if Apple is to be taken at its word, it seems they won’t give up my music listening or news reading data to advertisers or other third parties.
 

mSpot

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I don't really know what kind of APIs Spotify offers
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/

Also clear enough evidence that Spotify software development infrastructure and philosophy is way superior - at least to [laughables like] Tidal and Qobuz, not in the same league.)
Spotify actively communicates about their engineering development and participates in open source.
https://engineering.atspotify.com/

Spotify Engineering Culture gained a lot of attention with this 2014 video, and other companies have adopted their model.

 

_thelaughingman

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I hope that you're wrong, I can't stand Apple cultism. At the end of the day Tidal and Apple compared in level matched, blind listening tests will sound the same. Are people really expecting audible differences? Tidal has a great catalogue (far from perfect) and why on earth would anybody celebrate less choice in a consumer market? Makes no sense to me.

I don't think this comes down to cultism or lack of competition. For consumers that have everything Apple this means its a great choice to have, only down side to all these offerings is the artists get screwed out of money.
 

Saidera

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It appears on the whole that Apple's services have become more 'likeable'. The fact that 'Apple lossless' is for the purpose of bringing listeners what the artists intended rather than for the added value of transferring larger amounts of data as other platforms tend to see it, is significant. HiRes is thrown out of the equation. Competition will become more intense perhaps.

Playback remains to be seen but if Apple does release a Meizu-like dongle or add HiRes to its devices, most of the USB audio dongles will become obsolete.

The point is the "playback environment".
If it is "lossless" up to 48KHz / 24bit, it can be played directly from devices sold by Apple such as iPhone. However, in the case of high resolution lossless, the hardware does not have playback capability, so you will have to connect a DAC via USB etc. to listen.
Since Apple's future hardware strategy is unknown, it is currently unclear whether there will be "Apple products" with high playback capabilities such as lossless and high resolution lossless.

Edit: if Apple doesn't maintain the price to something lower than the already fairly affordable Meizu, or doesn't implement DSD, then other dongles will continue to thrive.
 
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Dogen

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The fact that we, and others, are giving this announcement so much attention means “mission accomplished” for Apple. No other company could bring so much attention to audio these days. That’s a good thing.
 

Ata

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I don't think this comes down to cultism or lack of competition. For consumers that have everything Apple this means its a great choice to have, only down side to all these offerings is the artists get screwed out of money.

My understanding is that revenue streams are split between label/publisher and artist according to the contract they have in place. It is not determined by the streaming contract, and Apple should be no better or worse than any other streaming music provider.

And what is fair for the artists, the labels issue not withstanding? Hollywood used to rely, and perhaps still is, on few select obscenely paid actors. Netflix and other streaming giants are breaking up that model, proving that the world is full of very talented actors and film production crews, driving down production costs, and average actor income, down, while maintaining and in some cases improving end product quality. The same may be happening with music and streaming. It has happened with apps in the various App Stores, too.
 
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vibess

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Don't have a beef with either apple or spotify. Currently using spotify and happy with it. Spotify is due an announcement of some sort thou.
Curious about Spatial and Atmos and how I can experience it without selling my soul apple. Will i be able to feed it to my 12 year old 5.1 DTS avr for example?
 

Ata

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Don't have a beef with either apple or spotify. Currently using spotify and happy with it. Spotify is due an announcement of some sort thou.
Curious about Spatial and Atmos and how I can experience it without selling my soul apple. Will i be able to feed it to my 12 year old 5.1 DTS avr for example?

Define what act constitutes "selling your soul to Apple"??? All you need to do is spend a few hundred dollars on equipment upgrades, say an Apple TV and a Dolby Atmos capable receiver. You could probably connect the Apple TV directly to your 12 year old compressed DTS 5.1 AVR (I know, I have one in storage), with its inferior DACs, and rely on Apple TV doing the transcoding, but if at all possible it will just not sound as good.
 

vibess

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It could possibly sound good enough for me, but yes I have been eying an apple tv, as well a new avr, later being a bigger investment.
 

Ralph_Cramden

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"But don't suboptimize"? So, what about that big play button that only lets you play an album in shuffle mode :facepalm: It seems to be the bane of many Spotify users, yet they refuse to change or at least make it user-configurable.

Yep, as an album listener (primarily), I find that button just short of offensive. I use the Spotty plugin in LMS, so thankfully it's not an issue for home use.
 

Zensō

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The fact that we, and others, are giving this announcement so much attention means “mission accomplished” for Apple. No other company could bring so much attention to audio these days. That’s a good thing.
Yup, like it or not, Apple is a very big fish in audio.

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