Apple Music Redesign - Now with Zune!

[BingoFishy]

paid not payed.

 

sorry.

[TetraSky]

As a former Zune user, I can somewhat see the resemblance, but it's not that similar to me. I can clearly tell them apart, but maybe that's just because I actually had a Zune.

[GoodBytes]

9 minutes ago, BingoFishy said:

paid not payed.

 

sorry.

Thanks, fix.

[LAwLz]

1 minute ago, SurvivorNVL said:

Hopefully they have ALAC.  AAC at 256kbps isn't bad, though.

Not as bad as Google Music, which uses MP3 (albeit at 320Kbps).

 

I don't get why the industry hasn't moved to Opus yet.

[SurvivorNVL]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

Not as bad as Google Music, which uses MP3 (albeit at 320Kbps).

 

I don't get why the industry hasn't moved to Opus yet.

Hopefully more and more do.

[vanished]

You can bet that Apple intentionally choose to hold this at the same time as E3.  It's their personality to act like the most important company ever in hopes that everyone will continue to believe it's true.

[SansVarnic]

I see the resemblance.

Apple does it again.

 

 

[atrash]

3 hours ago, SansVarnic said:

I see the resemblance.

Apple does it again.

 

 

 

Me too. And I've owned a Zune so it does bring back the memories.

[PlayStation 2]

oh my

the interface looks like arse

 

kill it pls

[abazigal]

Spotify is still haemorrhaging losses, precisely because a significant amount of its huge user base is on the free tier which costs Spotify more to run than it earns the in ad revenue. 

 

More isn't always better, especially when it doesn't give you more of what you want (more profits) but instead saddles you with more problems to contend with (higher losses). 

 

Apple Music may boast fewer users, but each user is a paying one, and in the long run, Apple Music seems to stand a higher chance of being financially viable compared to Spotify or any other music streaming service not backed by a huge corporation. 

[GoodBytes]

5 hours ago, abazigal said:

Spotify is still haemorrhaging losses, precisely because a significant amount of its huge user base is on the free tier which costs Spotify more to run than it earns the in ad revenue. 

 

More isn't always better, especially when it doesn't give you more of what you want (more profits) but instead saddles you with more problems to contend with (higher losses). 

 

Apple Music may boast fewer users, but each user is a paying one, and in the long run, Apple Music seems to stand a higher chance of being financially viable compared to Spotify or any other music streaming service not backed by a huge corporation. 

Dude.. Spotify had 30 million users that PAYS vs Apple's 15 million.

[Centurius]

1 hour ago, GoodBytes said:

Dude.. Spotify had 30 million users that PAYS vs Apple's 15 million.

And a part of that goes to subsidising the free tier 

[GoodBytes]

3 hours ago, Centurius said:

And a part of that goes to subsidising the free tier 

And how is that related to anything?

[Centurius]

9 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

And how is that related to anything?

It affects long term sustainability. When you don't need to subsidise a portion of your userbase you can focus money where it matters most, infrastructure and licensing.

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

19 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Not as bad as Google Music, which uses MP3 (albeit at 320Kbps).

 

I don't get why the industry hasn't moved to Opus yet.

I am no expert in audio, so can you explain what the big deal is with Opus?

 

I already consider MP3 obsolete, and I replace the MP3 audio clips (including songs) with ACC-MP4 where I can. I may have somewhat "low" standards, but for me, AAC VBR at ~200kbps is good enough. At what bitrate does Opus match the quality?

[Blade of Grass]

22 hours ago, SurvivorNVL said:

But is Apple Music getting FLAC?

Why would they? It's just a waste of storage space, 99.9999% of the time it makes little to no audible difference. 

[FratStar]

1 hour ago, Blade of Grass said:

Why would they? It's just a waste of storage space, 99.9999% of the time it makes little to no audible difference. 

SHHHHHHH Don't tell me the placebo effect is real allow me to believe what I want.

[LAwLz]

9 hours ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

I am no expert in audio, so can you explain what the big deal is with Opus?

 

I already consider MP3 obsolete, and I replace the MP3 audio clips (including songs) with ACC-MP4 where I can. I may have somewhat "low" standards, but for me, AAC VBR at ~200kbps is good enough. At what bitrate does Opus match the quality?

AAC and very comparable in terms of quality, except at low bit rates (100Kbps or lower) where Opus usually wins. At 200Kbps and over there shouldn't be a quality difference (at least not Opus vs AAC).

 

One benefit is that it is free and in freedom and free beer. Manufacturers and developers of end user encoders/decoders has to pay a licensing fee for ACC. If your device supports more than stereo audio then it costs as 1.5 units (and prices range from 0.98 dollars to 0.10 dollars per unit). So if you got 10.1 million users you will save about 2.4 million dollars by not using AAC. It's not that much money for a company like Apple or Samsung, but I think we should move away from formats which requires licensing fees as much as possible (and where it would not harm things like performance or quality).

 

Opus rise to fame is the latency though. It was originally developed for VoIP and as a result the latency is phenomenal. Formats like AAC and Vorbis are often in the ~200ms range, while Opus is usually below 20ms. It is even faster than AAC-LD (a codec based on AAC tuned specifically for low latency) which is somewhere between 20ms and 40ms on average.

 

It supports more channels. AAC already supports a quite ridiculous 48 channels so I don't know if you can call it a benefit, but Opus goes up to 255.

 

It is more robust to packet loss. Not useful for music playback but useful for live stuff (like phone calls and live broadcasts).

 

The big drawback is that it does not support 44.1kHz sampling rate. It can only do 48kHz, 24kHz, 16kHz, 12kHz or 8kHz. It's not really a problem though because it can do 44.1kHz -> 48kHz inaudibly well.

 

 

Looking at the release dates made me realize why it isn't more widely used... It was released late 2012. AAC has been around since 1997.

Anyway, for music listening it is not really better quality wise than AAC. I want the industry to swap to it for licensing reasons (everyone saves money) and it is more suitable for other things, so we could use the same codec everywhere.

[PlayStation 2]

3 hours ago, Blade of Grass said:

Why would they? It's just a waste of storage space, 99.9999% of the time it makes little to no audible difference. 

Honestly, why wouldn't they? If they have a useless file type sitting around *cough* ALAC *cough* then they might as well put it to good use.

[vanished]

4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

*snip*

and how does Ogg Vorbis stack up then?  That's been around for quite a while, and is free in the same way afaik

[LAwLz]

54 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

and how does Ogg Vorbis stack up then?  That's been around for quite a while, and is free in the same way afaik

Pretty much the same as against AAC as far as I know. Opus wins at really low bit rates, it's even at higher (like >200Kbps), Opus wins with latency (Vorbis is also ~200ms, like AAC). Vorbis support for sampling rates is much better. Not just because of 44.1kHz support but it also goes much higher. Opus tops out at 48kHz while Vorbus goes up to like 200 or something. I don't really think 48kHz is limiting Opus in any practical way though.

 

Xiph (organization behind both Vorbis and Opus) says that Opus can replace Vorbis.

Quote

Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete?

Theoretically, yes.

From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) it should replace both Vorbis and Speex, and the common proprietary codecs too.

 

Another huge thing about Opus is that it is super "flexible" (lack a better word for it). It can switch between modes in-band. One example I read about was a person who had an audio book. In the audio book there was some music sections. So in Opus the talking parts were mono with low bit rate, and then when the music parts came up it switched to stereo and high bit rate, seamlessly inside the same stream. They made it that way so that it can adapt to network conditions when using VoIP.

 

If you are interested in Opus I recommend this presentation by Greg Maxwell (worked on Vorbis and Opus). The first 17 minutes is about free codecs in general + Opus. The rest is about Daala (which I am super excited for as well, next generation video codec). For info on Daala I would recommend this video instead (it becomes very technical though, but the speaker is good).

 

[vanished]

37 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

*snip*

wow, that all sounds really awesome!  Now we just need it to catch on, just like replacements for gif and jpg that are much better.  I predict, pessimistically, that it/they won't though, since it's a catch 22.  People don't want to use them unless they're common and supported everywhere, but no one wants to bother supporting them unless they're common.

[LAwLz]

5 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

wow, that all sounds really awesome!  Now we just need it to catch on, just like replacements for gif and jpg that are much better.  I predict, pessimistically, that it/they won't though, since it's a catch 22.  People don't want to use them unless they're common and supported everywhere, but no one wants to bother supporting them unless they're common.

Facebook tried. Google developed WebP (great image format that is based on the video codec VP8). Facebook actually switched over to it but later had to go back to jpeg because people were complaining. The problem is that companies like Microsoft are for some reason extremely slow with supporting new codecs, and if something isn't supported natively in Windows then you will have a ton of people complaining that they can't use your format.

 

One of the most requested feature for Windows 10 was support for BGP (better portable graphics). There was no response from Microsoft last time I checked (and the suggestion page seems to have been taken down). Here is some info about BPG.

In summary:

• MUCH better compression than jpeg. Way better image quality at the same file size.
• Based on HEVC
• Can be decoded using the dedicated decoding blocks in GPUs. So that means very high performance and very low power usage.
• Supports transparency.
• Can be lossless, or lossy.
• Supports metadata.
• Animation support (because you know, it's based on a video codec).
• Up to 14bits per color channel (very high dynamic range support)

The drawback is that HEVC is not a free codec. So you will need a HEVC license to use BPG.

 

Here are examples of how it stacks up against jpeg. You can change image as well as encoding settings. The smaller the file is, the more noticeable the difference.

[vanished]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

*snip*

Yeah I know about some of gif and jpg's potential replacements, that's why I mentioned it.  They'd be great but they're just not catching on.

[CBojorges]

On 13/6/2016 at 2:21 PM, SurvivorNVL said:

But is Apple Music getting FLAC?

 

Tidal?