After being a Roon customer from the beginning I will not be renewing my subscription and will try and make Apple Music work after knowing these facts.
Apple Music is now lossless with hires
Apple Music has expanded Classical music after Primephonic acquisition.
Apple Music is $10 a month.
Easily streamed over airplay 2 to my not quite hifi tier Denon system.
Can stream 24/192 to my actual hifi from iPad>adapters>external hifi DAC.
Can stream over
Airplay 2 lossless with Wiim on hifi when I am browsing music.
Integrated with Alexa on my 8 different Echo devices.
Fast as lighting and easier for me to use.
Better curated music/videos
There is nothing on 4 TB san that is not available in Apple Music.
Too many other reasons to start listing.
I’ll have 11 months of Roon as backup to see if I ever have a need.
Ehh, Apple Music Classic is coming out at the end of the month, but it doesn’t seem that it will be available for offline listening like regular Apple Music. This is the app I’ve been waiting for ever since Apple purchased Primephonic, but it will useless if I can’t download the albums for offline listening. I only have 4 GB of data on my wireless plan and that won’t be enough for a month of music listening (and I listen a lot of on subways during my commute where there isn’t any wireless, at all.)
Hi - Airplay 2 does support lossless - CD quality 16bit 44.1k . It doesn’t do hires currently, but I have my iPad connect to my External DAC for that purpose and I can control it remotely as well by using Siri to play whatever Or skip… then holding my iPhone with Apple Music app open I can dynamically add or remove songs into a playlist and still only need a single user license.
I had been asking Roon for this for years. Their response was “Roon” was hard to interpret by Alexa. Just silliness…
Yes it’s capable of it but not via Apple Music it doesn’t it only streams aac and had been confirmed by a number of streamer manufacturers. You don’t get lossless at all via AirPlay 2. Streamers that support legacy AirPlay like Lumin get lossless up to 44.1. The limitation is thought to be there for multi room stability.
Thanks CrystalGipsy - It’s all confusing when so many websites say conflicting things and my yggy Dac for some reason does not light the 44.1 kHz regardless if going through Roon or otherwise that high quality light must be broken .
So many obstacles. Found Siri not working on my air 2 iPad when attached to camera adapter>usb. A “feature” of that iPad generation. So I’m using my iPhone instead for the short term tethered to Dac.
Yeah they don’t make Apple Music easy to play via a Hifi system, which is no surprise as it doesn’t sell units or keep the users in their eco system which is the only reason they have these services for.
I wish Apple could win me over, because I like a lot of things about it. But the problem I have is that Airplay sucks, they don’t let you do Roon, and it doesn’t even work as well as Spotify Connect, which is built into everything almost, including all my Bluesound devices. I can use airplay on one of my bluesound devices and then link to others, but it’s prone to drop-outs and feels like a kludge. If they made “Apple Connect” I would switch, but they don’t.
As a backup to Roon (Tidal and Qobuz), I have Apple Music (free from Verizon) on an iPad Mini 6 with camera adapter to DAC and 3.5 mm into my Meridian Prime pre-amp, RCA to Denon AVR-2805 (Pure Direct) and Pioneer HPM-2805 speakers. Sounds great. I can control the iPad play, pause, previous track, and next track with my iPhone Accessibility app. I use Soundiz to keep Apple Music in sync with Tidal and Qobuz.
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