It has nothing to do with hi-res audio’s only marginal sonic improvement over CD quality a margin dwarfed by recording/mastering quality differences and to a lesser extent by the jump from lossy to lossless. And it has nothing to do with hi-res audio’s puddle deep supply, typically less than 10% of any streaming service’s library. Why? Don’t I want Apple Music streaming in the highest possible quality? Actually, no. I’ll be selecting the first, not the second.
Good for the consumer, but less so for artist remuneration.īack at the Music app’s preference’s pane, we are presented with a further two lossless audio options: ‘ALAC up to 24bit/48kHz’ or ‘ALAC up to 24bit/192khz’. Apple Music is still US$9.99/€9.99 per month. Defying industry expectations, Apple has done this without any shift in pricing. It’s taken Apple twenty years to give its users the option to kick lossy compression into touch – to give us back the CD-quality audio that we had in the 80s and 90s with real CDs – and what a relief it is to write those words. Pop the streamers 🎉 and pour the champagne 🥂 because this single check box signifies the beginning of the end of the lossy digital audio era, kickstarted by Napster file-sharing in 1999 and then legalised and legitimised by Apple’s iTunes store in the record label panic that ensued: 99 cents for a song, delivered in 256kbps AAC to preserve bandwidth and storage.īefore the year is out, every song in Apple Music’s 70 million-strong arsenal should be available to stream in CD quality. A few titles might even show up in 24bit/48kHz. Tick it and Apple Music streams will come down the pipe in uncompressed 16bit/44.1kHz, CD-quality audio.
#Audirvana music player update#
The latest (11.4) macOS update rolling out to users this week adds a lossless audio option to the Music app’s preferences pane.
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