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Apple lossless official announcement

tmtomh

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They say you get "Play tracks in Dolby Atmos and hear over 75 million songs in lossless audio, ad‑free1", but above they differentiate between lossless and hires lossless, as I read that they are not actually offering hires currently.

We'll find out soon enough. But they're not offering any lossless currently, and they say only 20M of their 75M tracks will be offered in lossless upon launch, with the full 75M available by the end of the year. They say nothing one way or the other about tracks with sample rates higher than 48k being delayed (or not delayed) beyond the regular lossless tracks. And they say nothing about another tier. Anything is possible, but you are making some leaps in your interpretation of the wording of their press release, and with respect I am not persuaded by your claims that your logical leaps are actually "careful reading."
 

blueone

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Apple is so huge and so profitable it is difficult to put into perspective. Apple's net profit is roughly equal to the revenue of General Motors. Apple Music rides on the huge investment of Apple's cloud infrastructure, which is amortized over so many services. I'm not familiar with what Spotify does, but almost certainly they use someone else's cloud computing services, which is expensive. Amazon is like Apple.

Sorry, this is incorrect. I got my numbers mixed up. Apple's net profit in 2020 was $57.4B, while GM's revenue was $132B. I'm not good at multi-tasking, apparently.
 
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dmac6419

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They say you get "Play tracks in Dolby Atmos and hear over 75 million songs in lossless audio, ad‑free1", but above they differentiate between lossless and hires lossless, as I read that they are not actually offering hires currently.
Hires starts next month
 

dmac6419

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lossless audio with home theatre dolby truehd dtshdma is a SCAM they use near field mixing today no theatrical far field original mixes unless you happen to own Laserdsic. Nearly all 4k movies are watered down with dynamic range that are only good for bose speakers. I more less turned my back on 4k now as it is lossless audio Scam.
I can live with that
 

chelgrian

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Are you sure - source?

Most people simply don't understand what atmos is doing underneath or misunderstand the marketing or even Dolby's own documents. Based on what we know so far on what is in shipped hardware and tea leaf reading from the press releases we can make some educated guesses.

The default distribution format for Atmos is Dolby Digital Plus at up to 6144 Kbps lossy encoding up to 15.1 channels plus metadata. However for headphones there would be no point in sending this amount of data if you are immediately going to render it in to binaural for headphones. An obvious optimisation would be to stream a pre done binaural render.

They could pull a similar trick with their own devices internal speakers. Note there is nothing in the press release about Atmos out of an HDMI port on a Mac or AppleTV only headphones and device internal speakers. We know that current macs with the newest USB-C to HDMI dongle are physically capable of outputing a Dolby Digital Plus stream as it's used for things like Netflix. However there is nothing in the press release saying that outputing the raw DD+ stream out of Apple Music for external decoding is a supported thing.

The structure of an original Atmos mix is that it has up to 128 audio channels allocated between zero or more beds of up to 9.1 and the balance allocated to objects. In music beds are recommended against and the idea seems to be to use all object mixes.

Obviously you can't deliver 128 channels in to 15 channels so the encoder for 'home' Atmos groups the original channels depending on where the object is panned then assigns encoded channels and metadata based on that. The renderer then produces the correct signals for each speaker based on this.

However it's not that simple as Atmos is backwards compatible to non Atmos Dolby Digital Plus decoders and even Dolby Digital by the Plus decoder re-encoding to Dolby Digital. To achieve this the Atmos rendering cannot be fully dynamic there must be a prerendered 5.1 legacy stream within the Dolby Digital Plus stream which can be used by legacy decoders which simply ignore the Atmos data. Thus only the remaining 10 channels can be being rendered to arbitrary speakers locations locally.

For classical recordings though you'd ignore all Dolby's advice record in 2nd order ambisonic format then render into a 7.1.2 bed and totally ignore the object system.
 

dmac6419

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Most people simply don't understand what atmos is doing underneath or misunderstand the marketing or even Dolby's own documents. Based on what we know so far on what is in shipped hardware and tea leaf reading from the press releases we can make some educated guesses.

The default distribution format for Atmos is Dolby Digital Plus at up to 6144 Kbps lossy encoding up to 15.1 channels plus metadata. However for headphones there would be no point in sending this amount of data if you are immediately going to render it in to binaural for headphones. An obvious optimisation would be to stream a pre done binaural render.

They could pull a similar trick with their own devices internal speakers. Note there is nothing in the press release about Atmos out of an HDMI port on a Mac or AppleTV only headphones and device internal speakers. We know that current macs with the newest USB-C to HDMI dongle are physically capable of outputing a Dolby Digital Plus stream as it's used for things like Netflix. However there is nothing in the press release saying that outputing the raw DD+ stream out of Apple Music for external decoding is a supported thing.

The structure of an original Atmos mix is that it has up to 128 audio channels allocated between zero or more beds of up to 9.1 and the balance allocated to objects. In music beds are recommended against and the idea seems to be to use all object mixes.

Obviously you can't deliver 128 channels in to 15 channels so the encoder for 'home' Atmos groups the original channels depending on where the object is panned then assigns encoded channels and metadata based on that. The renderer then produces the correct signals for each speaker based on this.

However it's not that simple as Atmos is backwards compatible to non Atmos Dolby Digital Plus decoders and even Dolby Digital by the Plus decoder re-encoding to Dolby Digital. To achieve this the Atmos rendering cannot be fully dynamic there must be a prerendered 5.1 legacy stream within the Dolby Digital Plus stream which can be used by legacy decoders which simply ignore the Atmos data. Thus only the remaining 10 channels can be being rendered to arbitrary speakers locations locally.

For classical recordings though you'd ignore all Dolby's advice record in 2nd order ambisonic format then render into a 7.1.2 bed and totally ignore the object system.
Atmo's music sounds just fine,the that are recorded right
 

richard12511

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I just need Roon/JRiver support for either Apple Music or Spotify :(. Mainly just for the album recommendations, which is my main method of discovering new (great) music and artists. Quobuz and Tidal's recommendations are nowhere near as good as Apple/Spotify, but Roon is even better than Apple/Spotify. Might be worth trying Apple again, though. I'm really considering it. From memory, the albums recs weren't that much worse than Roon, and it's way cheaper than Roon + Qobuz + Tidal Hifi.

The other thing I need Roon for is EQ, as uploading a convolution file is my current method of EQing my bass(GLM handles the mains). I guess that's pretty important too. Maybe there's something else that could replace this, though.
 

richard12511

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I am not sure that lossless will make people drop Spotify. Their interface and predictions are good and the envy of the Music Streaming Industry.

I am somewhat surprised by my stance toward lossless: I no longer care about it.
There! I just lost all of my previously diminished, audiophiles creds :D

And ... I am not alone. I would dare advance that less than 5% Apple Music subscribers care one bit about lossless.

Yeah, I'm more excited about the multichannel stuff.
 
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richard12511

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I would say that your 5% is probably high. BUT, I would say that 99% would SAY they care. Marketing 101; convince the customer they NEED what you have. Apple is pretty good at that.

Good point. They may get a small portion of Spotify's share just based on people thinking Hi-Res must sound better. I don't think many now how difficult it is to tell Hi-Res and good compression apart.

I do fear for Qobuz/Tidal a bit here. This may really hurt them.
 

_thelaughingman

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Good point. They may get a small portion of Spotify's share just based on people thinking Hi-Res must sound better. I don't think many now how difficult it is to tell Hi-Res and good compression apart.

I do fear for Qobuz/Tidal a bit here. This may really hurt them.
This would definitely hurt Qobuz for genuine hi-res catalogue they have. The pull of Apple may cause people to leave.
 

richard12511

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And perhaps profits. Apple Music doesn’t necessarily have to be a profit center in and of itself (think of Apple Maps). It’s primarily a value-added service to further lock people into the Apple ecosystem to sell more iPhones. Spotify, on the other hand, has never made a profit and will need to do so at some point.

Wow didn't know Spotify has never made a profit! That's wild, considering mostly what I hear is that Spotify doesn't pay artists enough, but maybe it simply can't? Assuming they're already in the red paying artists what they do now...
 

Newman

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A newbie question from me. How does one get Apple Music atmos from a Mac to a multichannel Hifi?

Via USB to AVR?

Via HDMI to AVR?

Does it have to be an atmos-capable AVR?

Any way that doesn’t involve an AVR?

cheers
 

richard12511

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Apple is so huge and so profitable it is difficult to put into perspective. Apple's net profit is roughly equal to the revenue of General Motors. Apple Music rides on the huge investment of Apple's cloud infrastructure, which is amortized over so many services. I'm not familiar with what Spotify does, but almost certainly they use someone else's cloud computing services, which is expensive. Amazon is like Apple.

Spotify may actually use Amazon's (AWS) services :D.
 

Zensō

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I just need Roon/JRiver support for either Apple Music or Spotify :(.

You, me, and a lot of other people. Unfortunately, the COO of Roon has publicly said Spotify won’t work with them. I suspect there’s even less chance of Apple doing so. It feels as if Roon is in a precarious position with so much riding on Tidal and Qobuz.
 

wgb113

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I won‘t be re-upping on Roon this year. This latest version of Apple Music is enough for me in terms of streaming and library management. Best part is I’ll be saving money.
 

Tks

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I just need Roon/JRiver support for either Apple Music or Spotify :(. Mainly just for the album recommendations, which is my main method of discovering new (great) music and artists. Quobuz and Tidal's recommendations are nowhere near as good as Apple/Spotify, but Roon is even better than Apple/Spotify. Might be worth trying Apple again, though. I'm really considering it. From memory, the albums recs weren't that much worse than Roon, and it's way cheaper than Roon + Qobuz + Tidal Hifi.

The other thing I need Roon for is EQ, as uploading a convolution file is my current method of EQing my bass(GLM handles the mains). I guess that's pretty important too. Maybe there's something else that could replace this, though.

JRiver is a no-go, owners say Apple won't mess with anyone, let alone them. Spotify similarly, but at least from them you might get a reply.

Apple doesn't care, because they're Apple and they want all the control they can get. While Spotify doesn't want to be held down by agreements that could bite them in the ass when perhaps selling themselves to another entity later on which may be annoyed they signed agreements with third parties that the new company may have to honor in a buy-out.
 

tomchr

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Lossless. No MQA. Yeah, baby!! Hopefully the Atmos is only on select tracks (by the artist's choice) or can be disabled.

Tom
 
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