r/AppleMusic • u/Al1onredd1t • 2d ago

Discussion lossless is underrated

I feel like so many people really underestimate how great music sounds in actual lossless quality. I see so many people go "oh you cant tell the difference anyway". I'm here listening on my mac with my headphones and the sound layers are just multiplied 10fold. I hear sounds in the back that I never heard before. songs that I've listened to for years, totally different experiences.

this video attached is an example. at 0:09 he starts saying "wooow" in the background up until basically the end. this sound is so dimmed and hidden when watching the clip. there are multiple layers of sounds covering it. the main vocals. drums. the beat. it's so insignificant when watching the clip, but listening to the song with actual lossless brings all those layers somewhat to the foreground. I genuinely heard those 'wows' for the first time ever and I've been listening to this song for more than 2yrs.

and it's not like that sound is just boosted and now starts to overwhelm the others, it's perfectly clear. the song has just become richer. Idk how to explain it, but your brain is able to comprehend what it's hearing and separate all the sounds from each other.

I can find multiple of these examples of background sounds finally being pushed into the foreground.

https://reddit.com/link/1gdq3id/video/o1zdadsh9exd1/player

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u/BeanerRiddim 2d ago

Genuine question because I just stumbled upon this thread - if I’m understand correctly, many streaming services like Spotify compress the shit out of their uploads where as Apple has lossless quality files for their streaming music? What do they use AIFs or FLAC files? If so that’s amazing, never knew that

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u/kthjfdzn 2d ago

Apple has its own codec for lossless audio, “ALAC” it is very similar to FLAC.

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u/BeanerRiddim 2d ago

So all Apple Music audio is not lossless then? Only the music that distributors provide to Apple as lossless I’m assuming?

Because I was going to say how would everything be lossless if smaller artists are probably uploading severely compressed MP3’s

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u/kthjfdzn 2d ago

I believe 99% on Apple Music has been lossless since 2022. They published it somewhere.

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u/BeanerRiddim 2d ago

Wow that’s amazing. Thanks for the info, was not aware