‘Apple Music will soon let you stream music without loss of quality’

Apple will soon expand its music streaming service with the ability to stream music without data loss, so-called lossless music. After 9to5Mac previously found clues in the Apple Music app from iOS 14.6 Beta, it is now the turn of the Android app.

Lossless music on Apple Music

Streaming services hardly compete on the supply of music, and the prices of the subscriptions hardly differ from each other. One way to differentiate yourself is to launch an option to stream supposedly lossless music. Tidal is a forerunner in that area but cannot keep up with services like Spotify and Apple Music when it comes to user numbers. Both Spotify and Apple Music are working on the ability to stream such high quality audio files to your devices. Apple Music appears to be gearing up to launch the feature on Android and iOS, 9to5Google suggests.

The website bases that claim on data from the code underlying the Apple Music app on Android. Code of version 3.6.0 Beta of the app contains an explanation about lossless audio. Apple says in its explanation that streaming lossless music “preserves every detail of the original file.” The American tech giant has also added an explanation of the ‘space that lossless audio takes up’ on phones, and in addition, Apple mentions how much data streaming lossless music will take. With this, the company warns users against the high data consumption of lossless music, which can possibly lead to high data costs.

Lossless and High-Res Lossless

Currently, Apple Music users can take advantage of two quality settings, choosing between data saving and high quality. With the advent of lossless audio, Apple is adding two options, as evidenced by references to Lossless and High-Res Lossless in the app’s underlying code. The difference between the two variants of lossless music is that the basic variant goes up to 48 kHz, while the High-Res Lossless level goes up to 192 kHz. For these files, Apple is moving away from its AAC codec – a codec that encodes audio into a manageable file – to the ALAC codec it developed itself for lossless audio.

Previous references to Dolby Atmos and Dolby Audio in the Apple Music app for iOS are not found in the beta version of the Apple Music app on Android. Apple, meanwhile, also removed the reference to the brand names from its iOS app. It is therefore quite possible that Apple Music will receive support for both standards in the near future, but that Apple is waiting for the release of its lossless music feature to reveal that.

Rates of Apple Music

In early May, it was stated by Hits Double Daily that Apple plans to offer a special subscription for its lossless music feature. The subscription would get the same price as the current Apple Music subscription, which is ten dollars per month. Before the launch, Apple is waiting for the launch of the third generation of AirPods, according to the website. So it is possible that Apple will release the lossless music options very soon, although that is still uncertain at the moment.

What do you think of the option to stream lossless audio? Would you use the option, or does it add (too) little for you? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of the article.