Apple announces lossless music format for Apple Music, officially launched in June, completely free

Apple Music will get two major updates next month. It is an update to add high-quality and lossless music formats, along with updated Spatial Audio surround sound via Dolby Atmos.

It’s worth noting that these updates will be made available completely free of charge to all registered users, including student and family plan users. Apple says there will be about 20 million lossless songs when the update rolls out, and that will increase to 75 million songs by the end of the year.

Apple confirmed that lossless format songs will be exclusive to the Apple Music service. Apple will not offer a service to buy music in lossless quality, nor will there be a way to upgrade songs that users already own to lossless using the paid iTunes Match service. This means that users can only listen online.

To enable songs with lossless format, users will need to update to the latest version of Apple Music (coming in June), go to Settings > Music > Audio Quality.

Apple Music’s lossless songs will start at 16-bit at 44.1 kHz, followed by 24-bit at 48 kHz with Apple devices. The highest quality is 24 bit at 192 kHz, but to be able to experience this High-Resolution Lossless quality, users will need external DACs.

In addition, Apple Music will also update the Spatial Audio surround sound feature, capable of directly processing 5.1, 7.1 or Dolby Atmos signals to create a lifelike 3-dimensional space. This feature can support recent AirPods or Beats headphones that use the H1 or W1 chip.

Lossless audio is slowly becoming the standard on music streaming services. Amazon also announced today that it will offer free Amazon Music HD to Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers. Spotify is also expected to launch HiFi high-quality audio later this year.

Reference: theverge