Apple Music lossless streaming

8

I hate to prove you wrong. :wink:

When streaming Apple Music via Airplay 2, Apple is always transmitting AAC256 encoded files (only exception are ripped, locally stored files)…
Even when the iPhone/iPad is stating “Lossless / HighResLossless” (badge) - in the background it just uses the compressed file.

You can check for yourself.

  1. Play a lossless Song in Apple Music and cast it to your Arcam via Airplay 2
  2. Open the Arcam Webclient (IP-Adress in Browser) and download the system logs.
  3. Extract and navigate to /tmp/log/cast_shell
  4. Look for “Initialize codec:” and “Estimated audio bitrate”.
    It will be “aac” and “~256 kbps”

I know ALAC is possibly via Airplay 2 and i do not know, why Apple is not using it. But they just don’t. Quite misleading to be honest. Especially, because they don’t hide the “lossless” badge in Apple Music when casting via Airplay (they do on Android with Chromecast).

Here is another proof from the Naim Stuff:

Sorry for the long post, but perhaps it is of interest for you or someone else.

If lossless will work in the hopefully near future, i’m going to update this post. :slight_smile:

Best regards!