Apple Music audio quality

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Tech Radar wrote about issues they want Apple Music to fix.

Surprisingly, Apple Music streams at a bitrate of 256 kbps, which is lower than most of its competitors. Spotify, Rdio, MOG and even Beats Music, which Apple Music’s streaming foundation is built on, all stream at 320 kbps (Beats Music still streams at this quality on Android and Windows Phone devices, rubbing even more salt on our wounds).

And then there’s Tidal, which manages to stream its music at the lossless FLAC bitrate of 1411 kbps. So what gives, Apple? Why is the biggest and baddest new streaming service on the block peddling inferior audio quality?

You would think that an article about music streaming would be written by someone with some knowledge about how digital music works, or at least research about it before publishing a post. Beats streamed 320 kbps MP3 files, while Spotify a variety of files. Apple Music streams 256 kbps ACC files.

256 kbps ACC files are comparable to 320 kbps MP3 files, and people find the lower bitrate AAC having higher fidelity, but apparently Tech Radar and several other writers only look at the bitrate and accuse Apple Music of serving inferior quality.

Spotify streams MP3 files at 96 kbps on mobile and 160 kbps on desktop and web player for the free service. It streams 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis files for Premium subscribers.

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