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Primephonic Becoming Apple Music: Alternatives?

Jmudrick

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No good news here. Apple neither supports DLNA streaming, nor provides gapless playback when streaming via Chromecast. That's why I quit after a trial. Now I have another 6 months but anticipate I'll drop it again for those reasons regardless of the Primephonic sourced improvements.
 

Atanasi

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So, I started a free trial. Apple Support says an account can only have a single promotion, so now the Primephonic code cannot be used with my account.
I had a free trial started earlier, but the promotion code worked for me. The link in the email didn't work, but I copied the promotion code and entered into the account settings where there is a field for entering promotion codes. An additional six-month period was added to my account.
 

Jmudrick

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I had a free trial started earlier, but the promotion code worked for me. The link in the email didn't work, but I copied the promotion code and entered into the account settings where there is a field for entering promotion codes. An additional six-month period was added to my account.

Yup, did the same and works.
 
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MRC01

MRC01

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That's good to know. But the fact that Apple doesn't support ALAC in a browser is a non-starter for me. Their poor customer support doesn't get me excited either.
Idagio does stream lossless FLAC in their browser player, so I've reactivated my account there.
 

MarkS

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Just curious as to why playing through a browser is an important consideration ...
 
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MRC01

MRC01

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Simple: I listen to music from my desktop computer while I'm working. It runs Linux, and Firefox is my streaming audio player of choice, since it integrates with PulseAudio playing streams at their native rates. In contrast, Chrome resamples all audio streams to one fixed format.
 

julian_hughes

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This app appears to be nothing more than the browser player wrapped in an app. It has no settings for audio quality, at least none that I can find. Am I missing something?

No, you're not missing anything. It is just a wrapper around the website.
 

restorer-john

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I called Apple and got more info, sharing here as it may be helpful to others.

Primephonic provided a code for 6 months of Apple Music. I tried that code and Apple's site did not accept it. So, I started a free trial. Apple Support says an account can only have a single promotion, so now the Primephonic code cannot be used with my account. The only reason I started the trial is because the code didn't work in the first place, but that doesn't matter to Apple.

They confirmed that ALAC is not supported in the browser, which has no settings for audio quality.

Looks like it's back to Idagio...

Wow, what a disaster. So you've lost your Primephonic promotion because of their screwup?
 
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MRC01

MRC01

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Well, despite the screwup and poor support I could probably enter the code manually. But it's not worth doing because I won't be using Apple Music anyway. If Apple ever supports ALAC in the browser player I'll give them another try. Until then, I reactivated my old Idagio subscription.
 

MarkS

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Sorry for the useless tip, I thought it would be the real thing.
 

VMAT4

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... Looks like it's back to Idagio...

We're really in a pickle here, Idagio has great sound and limited catalogue or Apple Music which has great catalogue and limited fidelity.
I'll take the bigger catalogue. One can take audiophilia only so far.
 
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DeLub

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We're really in a pickle here, Idagio has great sound and limited catalogue or Apple Music which has great catalogue and limited fidelity.
I'll take the bigger catalogue. One can take audiophilia only so far.

Limited fidelity? What more than lossless/hi-res lossless do you want?
 

VMAT4

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Limited fidelity? What more than lossless/hi-res lossless do you want?

No good news here. Apple neither supports DLNA streaming, nor provides gapless playback when streaming via Chromecast. That's why I quit after a trial. Now I have another 6 months but anticipate I'll drop it again for those reasons regardless of the Primephonic sourced improvements.

That's good to know. But the fact that Apple doesn't support ALAC in a browser is a non-starter for me. Their poor customer support doesn't get me excited either.
Idagio does stream lossless FLAC in their browser player, so I've reactivated my account there.
 

Ralph_Cramden

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The open source Concertmaster/Concertino look interesting for Spotify/Apple Music Classical fans. Spotify is, at some point soon, going to have a HiFi tier.

Screenshot 2021-09-14 2.34.35 PM.png
 

MarkS

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Looks great, but runs in a browser on a mac, which means lossless not available?
 

Ralph_Cramden

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Looks great, but runs in a browser on a mac, which means lossless not available?

Probably. I refuse to use Apple products because of their walled-garden lock-in and their monopolistic business practices.

Spotify is MUCH more open, with excellent APIs. The Concertmaster web app doesn't appear to support Spotify Connect at this time, but Spotify has a beta API for doing just that, so hopefully it will be integrated at some point. Spotify has promised a HiFi lossless tier sometime this year, so looks like the stars may be aligning for an excellent Primephonic alternative, including on a Mac.
 
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