Apple Music Lossless Annoucement

[bc4nz1tz]

Hey, 

I recently installed moode on a PI4 with a DAC I got from Aliexpress. I just wanted to point out to the announcement apple did today. All of their library will support lossless now and even high res lossless if you opt in at no additional cost. I believe this is huge news for the streaming market, and could bring a influx of users to the audiophile community, because suddenly every AM subscriber just got access to their complete library in high res lossless.

More details here:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/05/a...ess-audio/

It will be released in June. When it does, I am thinking having a permanent setup in my leaving room, so I have a couple of questions. 

I know I can use Airplay. Is there a way to find out in realtime (logs for example) what is the depth and sample rate for the track currently playing via Airplay (or any other source really)?

If Airplay ends up not supporting lossless or it's not high res, do you know to connect an iPhone or iPad via usb to the PI?

Thanks,

[Tim Curtis]

Menu, Audio info.

Airplay 1 which moOde uses encodes source tracks as 16/44.1 lossless (ALAC). This means if the source track is already 16/4.1 then there is no resampling. I don't know what Airplay 2 does but currently there is no Open Source implementation so its a non issue at this time.

[bc4nz1tz]

Menu, Audio info.

Airplay 1 which moOde uses encodes source tracks as 16/44.1 lossless (ALAC). This means if the source track is already 16/4.1 then there is no resampling. I don't know what Airplay 2 does but currently there is no Open Source implementation so its a non issue at this time.

Thanks Tim. When playing trough Airplay the UI is blocked and all I see is a disconnect button. Any trick to get around that? Or any other way to get the information from terminal or log files?

[MikeyFresh]

Menu, Audio info.

Airplay 1 which moOde uses encodes source tracks as 16/44.1 lossless (ALAC). This means if the source track is already 16/4.1 then there is no resampling. I don't know what Airplay 2 does but currently there is no Open Source implementation so its a non issue at this time.

Thanks Tim. When playing trough Airplay the UI is blocked and all I see is a disconnect button. Any trick to get around that? Or any other way to get the information from terminal or log files?

It will be 16/44.1kHz as Moode is using AirPlay1 as Tim said.

In other words I don't know what information you'd be looking for at this point, if you send AirPlay1 a hi-res file it will be down-sampled, and that happens on the send side if I'm not mistaken, meaning it isn't Moode that would do the resampling, that happens before the file is transmitted at the source.

Even if you then get a source that is AirPlay2 compatible, it would take until such time as there is an open source version of AirPlay2 before Moode would play it as anything but 16/44.1.

[Tim Curtis]

Menu, Audio info.

Airplay 1 which moOde uses encodes source tracks as 16/44.1 lossless (ALAC). This means if the source track is already 16/4.1 then there is no resampling. I don't know what Airplay 2 does but currently there is no Open Source implementation so its a non issue at this time.

Thanks Tim. When playing trough Airplay the UI is blocked and all I see is a disconnect button. Any trick to get around that? Or any other way to get the information from terminal or log files?

Before starting an Airplay session open one of the config pages for example Audio Config then you can do Menu, Audio info.

[GhezoArt]

Hello All,

More than using airplay, it should be great to have a direct access to Apple Music from the RPI Moode Audio in HR Lossless.

Best regards.

[MikeyFresh]

Hello All,

More than using airplay, it should be great to have a direct access to Apple Music from the RPI Moode Audio in HR Lossless.

Best regards.

That's just not going to happen, not until Apple Music is no longer a proprietary walled garden, closed source means they want integrators to pay a license fee.

[TheOldPresbyope]

Regarding hi-res streams and AirPlay 2, don't hold your breath. 

Yes, the shairport project has AirPlay 2 in its sights, which means moOde likely will get an AirPlay 2-compatible Renderer some day. 

However, I suspect AirPlay 2 itself does not and likely will not support hi-res streams if by hi-res we mean greater than 48 kHz bit-rate. You can see my reasoning in my comment to shairport-sync issue #1194.