Apple Music have announced full High Res support with Atmos support:
Amazon has had to cut their charges in response:
Is this likely to prompt a response from Roon?
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Did they just kill Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal in one fell Swoop?
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To me it seems like it. Looking through their Reddit’s, a lot of people are going to switch.
It also makes it harder to stick with those services given the cost and the fact that (in Qobuzs case) the app is worse than AM.
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Well Amazon has been doing HiRes for a little while now. The advantage to Tidal and Qobuz for this crowd is APIs that allow their services to be directly streamed to Roon and compatible DACs. Even Apple says in the fine print for HiRes Apple Music that you’ll need a DAC for it, but no guidance on exactly how that is supposed to work. Will you need a Mac, iPhone or iPad attached via USB somehow?
And then my last question is whether anyone with iTunes Match can upgrade their music past Redbook to HiRes. I’m guessing not, but it would be nice to know.
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Not for me as they do not, at this time work with Roon, also they do not, at this time, deliver MQA. That’s a deal breaker.
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According to apple the Dac will work when it’s connected to anything playing the Apple Music app, that also includes airplay devices.
Yup, it’s now official. Hi-res coming to Apple Music. That was it for Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer. And Spotify is beginning to look old. I’m afraid that’s also a blow to Roon. A subscription to Apple Music combined with one for Idagio, which has a powerful search function, compared to which Roon’s looks decideldy pedestrian (classical music only) will set you back a meagre 20 €. That’s it for me. Byebye Qobuz and, most probably, Roon.
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Not kill but the smaller players will feel a little squeezed by these aggressive pricing moves by the big boys with very deep pockets
Will be interesting to see what the landscape looks like , 2 years from now, say June 2023…
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iTunes Match is included in the Apple Music subscription as it turns out, so yes you would get the upgrade and can carry all music over.
Plus. Apple Music was never bad curated and even their radio station weren’t bad. Lossy format was was turned me away from them. Once there is a decent RPi implementation of AP2 I am all in.
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I agree, I think their playlists are excellent.
Also helps that apps like Marvis allow me to get the focus feature from Roon in Apple Music.
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Airplay 2 does not support 24 bit 192k files to the best of my knowledge. So to get this level to work you’d need a hard wired dac to an Apple computer. However I would imagine this is a temporary situation but it took a long time to go from AirPlay 1 to airplay 2……
I agree this is really a game changer - especially with atmos support……… will really put pressure on tidal and Qobuz, etc.
Roon really needs to get Apple Music support now but I don’t see Apple letting that happen…… I hope I’m wrong…….
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Zero chance of Apple Music or Spotify but a glimmer of chance with Amazon Music HD because 3rd party API integration exists on BluOS devices already.
It’s a really crap 3rd party integration but it exists. So there’s a chance !
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I believe the suggestion is that given Apple owns that protocol, firmware updates will remove that restriction.
Not all products that supported airplay 1 could firmware update to airplay2. You often saw airplay 2 be supported in new generations of products…… in the end, we’ll see………
The extreme dependence on Tidal has always been Roon’s vulnerability.
Yes, I know lots of people own massive download libraries, but for the majority of us streaming services is where it’s at. Hopefully Tidal survives this.
(Edit: there’s Qobuz, too, but I think it’s even more niche?)
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I agree with you, definitely not simple but apple is a trillion dollar company.
This will probably cause some people to go back to Apple Music who left because of the lack of hi-res streaming. But it also brings the whole idea of hi-res music into the mainstream, which I hope will lift all boats as they say. I myself pitched Apple Music for Qobuz, not because of music quality - it all sounds fine to my old ears - but because I just never liked the Apple Music app, especially on the Mac. And I’m a big Apple fan in general. Roon + Qobuz curation has opened my eyes to new things to listen to much more than Apple Music playlists ever did.
So, I guess I’m saying people choose a music service for many reasons. The number of bits in the stream is important to people who hang out on this forum, but I’m pretty sure most other people choose based on what their friends use, or the UI, or price.
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I just signed up for free trial since I have beta 14.6 installed on my phone but current beta does not have Apple Music lossless yet.
Originally I planned to switch to Spotify lossless when it gets released but I’ve heard Apple has an even bigger library and I already have Apple products throughout the house. I think if Spotify keeps the upgrade free, I might still go with them since Spotify connect is better and also have better playlists.
I’ve already tested running Spotify thru HQPlayer on my iMac and back to my streamer, and it works. I could do the same with Apple Music but still need to see how that would work. If I remote the Apple Music on the Mac or just send thru Airplay 2. With HQPlayer, don’t really need more than 44.1k files to sound great.
If I don’t want to use HQPlayer, I can just go Spotify Connect or AirPlay directly to my streamer as well. It’s good to have options. I’m also a lifetime roon member, so I can always come crawling back if things don’t work out.
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Airplay 2 actually does support HiRes music as a part of the spec laid out at WWDC a few years ago, but right now it hasn’t been implemented anywhere to my knowledge. Obvious uses would be existing Airplay 2 enabled receivers that already handle HiRes ALAC files (anything recent from Denon/Marantz for example). But as it stands, even if you have HiRes ALAC in your iTunes/Apple Music library, it gets downrezzed to 16/44.1 before the receiver gets it. Also, old devices like the Apple Airport Express which did get an Airplay 2 update after it was discontinued will likely always output at 16/44.1 since the only digital output it has is S/PDIF.
DAC support is going to be the interesting thing here. Most DACs are USB with a handful having HDMI inputs as well. It’s not that MacOS or iOS/iPadOS hasn’t had DAC support…Roon, JRiver , Audiovana, Onkyo (iOS) and others have all used it for many years. But iTunes/Apple Music hasn’t which means that there now has to be code to support it in that app.
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