Article: Apple Music's Lossless and Hi-Res Mess

[Heckyman]

2 hours ago, Marco Klobas said:

Why Music app (specifically) turns lossless AirPlay into AAC is beyond me.

I’m guessing it’s to save bandwidth ($$); they want to limit people pulling lossless files from their servers. Especially as there is no benefit to lossless for the majority of their users.

[Heckyman]

Purist tendencies aside, after some more testing I'm rather liking the "broken" Audio Midi implementation of Apple Music on the M1 Mac mini / MacOS.

 

Very handy when trying to wring out ultimate sound quality from a streaming service / web browser etc by piping the system audio to HQ Player via Rogue Amoeba's Loopback software.

And under more casual conditions, by just setting the sample rate to "whatever" – it still sounds at least as good as using an iOS device (or Qobuz) which does do the autosample rate switching properly.

[Heckyman]

18 minutes ago, wklie said:

My question is, when you bring up the playing screen where you see a larger album art, and only the current playing track name is shown (instead of a list of tracks), do you see the Lossless logo? 

 

Yes, and including some Taylor Swift I tried too.

[Heckyman]

12 hours ago, jvvita said:

 Were you able to pipe apple music stream to hqplayer? I failed miserably with either black hole or loop back. Couldn’t get the stream to hqplayer.

 

Would you mind sharing the settings?

Yes, I followed the instructions here:

 

[Heckyman]

4 hours ago, maelob said:

Have anybody tried leaving their midi at 24/96 or 24/192 - is there a significant sound difference when playing just redbook tracks.  I know purists dont like that, but i would like to know if its really that bad. By the way i listen with my old IMAC 2013 so I am out of luck to try the new apple music on my mac.  I guess an excuse to buy a new computer. For now i guess i will still use Tidal. 

 

Yes, I’ve being doing this for months with different apps and recently with AM lossless. To me upsampling in MacOS Audio Midi sounds no worse than native rate playback, maybe it’s even slightly better.