Apple Music will soon let subscribers stream lossless audio at no extra cost
Several rumours talked about Apple entering the HiFi (high-fidelity) music market to compete with Tidal, Deezer and possibly Spotify. Apple was expected to tell us more about it on May 18 2021, but the announcement has arrived a day earlier. Apple Music will soon support Dolby Atmos and Spacial Audio. Existing Apple Music subscribers will also get access to its entire library in Apple's in-house lossless format, ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio CODEC). The service will be launched sometime in June 2021.
Apple states that only 'thousands' of tracks will be available with the aforementioned enhancements. Apple aims to make its entire library of 75 million songs available to subscribers in a lossless format. That could take a while, though. It will also make Apple Music one of the largest repositories of lossless music on the planet. One can stream the entry-level Apple Music lossless music at 16 bit 44.1kHz. The next step up is 24 bit 48kHz, and the fully maxed-out tier lets you stream content at 24 bit 192kHz.
While access to a vast library of lossless music is good news for Apple subscribers, there is one slight problem. Most Apple audio products cannot stream high-bitrate audio, primarily due to codec and hardware restrictions. The upcoming AirPods could be better suited for handling lossless music. Apple could also announce some new features for its existing (and new) devices at WWDC 2021, which is expected to happen sometime in the first week of June.
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