Article: Apple Music Lossless Mess Part 2: AirPlay

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Thanks, Chris.

 

I guess I will be digging out my 1st Gen AirPort Express. Pretty sure it still works.

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46 minutes ago, new_media said:

Thanks, Chris.

 

I guess I will be digging out my 1st Gen AirPort Express. Pretty sure it still works.

 

It still works! Pulled it out of a box in the attic, plugged it in, and it actually joined my network immediately.

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36 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Article updated with several UPDATED notes. 

 

Thanks to @Marco Klobas for mentioning this. 

 

With the configuration this way, it's possible to send lossless to both AirPlay 1 and 2 from the macOS!

 

Now that is surprising!

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I had to 

6 hours ago, Marco Klobas said:

I forgot to ask: on macOS, did you always choose AirPlay within Music app? Have you tested choosing AirPlay through volume menu bar (system-wide) instead?

 

I had to try this for myself. When I change the system-wide audio device to an AirPlay 2 device, "alerts and sound effects" continue to play through they built in speakers, confirmed in Audio MIDI Setup.

 

I was thinking that I would need to do something to prevent email alert notification from interrupting the music, but as long as there are no other open apps with audio output, I assume the signal should remain bit perfect for 16/44.

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31 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Yeah, it’s confusing. The Music app can play local content via USB but perfect,  it not content from Apple Music the streaming service. 

 

Chris, if you download the album from Apple Music to a Mac, so you are playing back from locally stored files, do you still not get bit perfect playback over USB?

 

If not, something strange is afoot.

 

I do not get bit perfect playback using an iPad through the USB camera connection kit, but this is true for both my own rips and downloaded Apple Music files.

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7 hours ago, Geoffrey Armstrong said:

That’s true. I also have the older generation AppleTV with Optical out; but with this I also can”t see the audio quality settings.

 

At the moment, I’m assuming the only way to get lossless (at 24/48) is out of an ATV 4k, that’s connected to an appropraite receiver via HDMI.

 

I don’t know how it determines if it’s connected to a receiver. I’ll try later with my Oppo disk player, to check if the ATV believes that’s a receiver.

 

This is no problem with the Tidal app on AppleTV, which I do believe is lossless and doesn’t need to see an HDMI receiver to output lossless.

 

I am running an ATV 4K into an HDMI splitter and getting 24/48 PCM, FWIW.

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1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I just tested @James lee's partial file capture and can verify it's bit perfect and illuminated the HDCD indicator on my DAC. 

 

Crazy that the file streaming from Apple Music isn't but perfect, but applying the right special sauce to it afterward makes it perfect. 

 

Very cool. I'm interested to see what he discovers about the LSB in a 24-bit stream.