Apple Music is Apple's streaming music service, comparable to similar streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music Unlimited, Google Play Music, Tidal, and others, though it has a leg up over many of its competitors with lossless audio and Spatial Audio support.
Apple Music boasts access to more than 75 million songs. Content can be streamed or downloaded for offline play, and there are also song and genre-based radio stations available along with the curated Beats 1 radio station.
Apple Music integrates with your existing
iCloud Music Library, so you can combine Apple Music songs with songs that you have previously purchased on iTunes all in one unified location.
Lossless Audio
Apple in June 2021 upgraded its entire music catalog to Lossless Audio with the ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) that preserves the details in the original audio file. Apple Music subscribers will be able to hear songs exactly as the artists recorded them in the studio.
At launch, 20 million songs supported the codec, with all 75 million Apple Music songs to available in Lossless Audio by the end of 2021.
The standard Lossless tier starts at CD quality, which is 16-bit at 44.1 kHz, and it goes up to 24 bit at 48 kHz. There's also a Hi-Res Lossless tier available at 24 bit 192 kHz, but Hi-Res Lossless requires an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
The AirPods,
AirPods Pro, and
AirPods Max do not support lossless audio. Apple says that lossless audio can be listened to using the latest Apple Music app on an
iPhone,
iPad, Mac, or
Apple TV. Support for lossless audio on the
HomePod and
HomePod mini will be
added in a future update.
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