Itunes Quality

[Tordis Hurrle]

Ihave purchased a few albums from the itunes store and am wondering, are they lossless? I understand that you need a subscription to apple music plus in order to stream lossless but are the songs that I purchased and downloaded lossless? Also, does it play back it lossless?

Yes, once you add them to your iTunes/Music library, they will play back lossless! Whether that sounds noticeably better than AAC/256 will depend on your ears, your equipment, the nature of the music, and your listening conditions.

As Niel notes, the iTunes Store does not sell lossless downloads. If you wish to buy lossless or hi-res music downloads, they are available at many online retailers including HDTracks.com, Beatport.com, Eclassical.com, Bandcamp.com, and others. Once it is downloaded, you can add it to your iTunes/Music library.

Music encoded as 256kbps AAC files first came to the iTunes Store in 2007 with the launch of Apple's iTunes Plus. That marked the debut of DRM-free music tracks encoded at a higher quality bitrate that Apple claims is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.

As of 2007 the audio files sold in the iTunes store have been encoded using the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) codec and distributed with .m4a extensions from the iTunes store. The 256 kbps setting is an average bit rate encoding scheme, not a fixed bit rate encoding scheme. The actual sample rate is varied dynamically based on the content and time.

This is somewhat subjective. The encoding is a lossy encoding so from a purely bit-wise perspective the content sold in the iTunes store is not 100% identical to content from a CD -- when expanded back to a .wav format to match the bits on a CD, the expanded bits from the AAC file would not match perfectly with the bits on the CD because of of the lossy encoding. However, it is said, bitrate of the encoding used on iTunes files imparts no human-perceptible loss in the audio when compared to the source CD material. This sort of stuff is harder to verify, requiring double blind tests and the opinions of hopelessly fallible human beings.

I wouldn't say night and day. The difference may be between afternoon and dinner time. I think that I have a pretty good audio system. I use Revel Ultima Salon 2 speakers backed up by an Ayre V-5xe amp, Ayre preamp, Acoustic Research DAC8 and an Aurender N100H as a source. Other sources are a recently significantly upgraded CJ Walker turntable and an Oppo BDP 95 disc player. When I play the same piece if music at 256 and in lossless, I often find that there is a slight but palpable loss of what I think of as a sort of sheen to the music. That sheen is not filled with 'hitherto unheard notes'. It is however filled with micro nuances to existing notes. It's the realism to cymbals and drums. However, on many recordings, I'm very hard pressed to hear any difference all. If the stuff wasn't there in the first place, it's hard to hear it on playback no matter the file (at 256 and above).

The Apple product is very good. If I want to listen to something critically, I'll hunt down a hi res flac or alac file, use a good quality cd or SACD or I'll use my turntable. On the other hand, for good quality, relatively inexpensive, every day listening, Apple's product is very good. I think that despite the numbers (256), Apple does some magical things within the ACC encoding.

I concur with the view that 256 is an average. Indeed, I think that it's floor. As I said above, I use an Aurender N100H digital streamer. The Aurender app on my iPad reveals the bitrate of all songs that are playing. Frankly, a very large number of Apple's ACC files report bitrates in the high 300s.

While listening on expensive well-configured audio systems ... you will clearly notice the difference from sharp, precise, involving, immersive music and environment of "genuine" audio sources from the ones that are compressed, which will lack this "natural and warm" feeling.

This immersive and warm "experience" really exists, the high end equipment are purchased by people who wants to experience that feelings, mostly alone and not as a show-off articles. And it is not cheap.

Listening to my cousins studio monitors via a pro/am-mixer I allways gets tired, but changing to the cd on the same setup, livens me up. I must admit that I am a psyciatric patient, so my brains are preoccupied with the "rightness" of the music, and it evades me in .m4a. Presently my ISP supplies me with music in a Dolby-compression. This works very fine. Uptill that we streamed it in a .mpg-format which I could not listen to on my NAD/Bowers-Wilkins setup. I have no explanation to these fenomenae and I have not listened to .m4a on the hi-fi, but I could do so if anyone is interested.

Some swear by WAV files, others (Armin Van Buuren being a notable superstar DJ) say anything over 192kbps MP3 is going to sound fine on any system. The general consensus is that 256kbps AACs (which as you say are equivalent to 320kbps MP3s) are going to sound fine on pretty much any system, including large club PAs. Frankly, other things like compression (see the Loudness Wars), quality of mastering and competence of producer in the first place are likely to play a far bigger part in the sound quality of a song than the difference between 320 MP3, 256 AAC and WAVs.

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At the risk of sounding completely insane, I ran into something unexpected tonight. I was browsing my music file and discovered that if you press the space bar on a file, it will play it. The player that plays the file isn't iTunes however. It is apparently a preview program built into the Finder app itself. If I had to guess, I would say it was QuickTime. To my surprise however, the sound quality was excellent. I found that I preferred it over iTunes or the other assorted players I've tried. The sound stage is very open and involving somehow. Does anyone know what this program actually is? Has anyone discovered this as well? I'm running Snow Leopard (10.6.3) with the latest version of iTunes installed.

afplay and finder output have the same levels and quality ie totally identical, so the finder is using afplay. and itunes sounds obviously and noticeably blatently worse ? like i wouldn't even need quality headphones to demo that ?

The question is why does it sound so much better and surely what we need is harmonised playback quality across the board, my presumption is that the finder is ramping output and levels / eq, compared to itunes which I have set for flat output ie no EQ or volume increase etc.

itunes sounds flatter and worse / lower volume therefore less open compared to the finder playback of the same file, but whichever way its not sensible for playback to sound better in the finder than through itunes ? as its disconcerting for the user discover there music app sounds worse than a finder preview ? this also made me conclude to holding onto some flac files when probably the massive difference with flac in the finder and 192Kbps VBR in itunes was not so much a file quality issue but in fact much more related to how they sound playback wise as engines, its probably that the finders output is tweaked ? but still its makes audio comparisons very hard unless one sticks to either finder output or itunes output ?

well I think it was good speculation because my ears thought they matched maybe its my versions of software, im not upgrading to itunes v11! as I dont like the interface changes, so im using 10.7 itunes still on os x 10.6.8, im just interested to get to the bottom of the differences in sound as its bugging me, if I play file in the finder and itunes they should sound the same by my book, but something is going on.

ok its good I can admit discovering my own foolishness -> ignore my previous comments, if you have any discrepancy in the form of a very audible presence difference in volume as I did, then first just make sure your itunes volume slider is at max, ie drag it left then right till it wont go no further, because the button on the slider on mine was at the end of the slider slot - ie no slider slot showing but when I actually grabbed the volume button it slid some pixels further to the right as the button is much wider than the height of the slot and goes beyond the end of the slot at full volume ie make sure its as far right as possible ie as close to the the full speaker icon as possible, obviously as itunes volume max is equal to whatever the volume is currently set to on the volume control F keys on the keyboard. as youd expect, but the finder always plays at the volume as set by the F keys logically, so if you want volume parity of playback between finder and itunes, itunes must be left at maximum and dont let anybody fiddle with it, its a pity it cant be locked ? as I thought it was at max because visually i could see no slider slot visible as it were, and any - even a few pixels from max volume in itunes slider and this difference will be very noticeable, less than the finders apparent volume level since it always plays back at the max of the F keys. it would be good if the itunes volume slider had a padlock icon next to it to lock from being moved. Ommadawn part2 now sounds as it should

There was a thread about this on the Apple Support forum that started after the iTunes 11 update. A few people reported that the update caused all their songs to play at a lower volume even with the master volume slider maxed out, and that when they turned up the volume at the preamp or receiver, the sound wasn't as good as it had been. Several people also noted that selecting a song at the Finder level and hitting the spacebar to play it (or using Quicktime or VLC), resulted in normal volume and good sound quality. Because I still have iTunes 10 on my main Mac Mini music server (because I love Cover Flow) but iTunes 11 on my MacBook Pro, I was able to test it: No difference; identical volume and sound quality. I had to wonder if the reports of lower volume were due to operator error.

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