When Apple and Amazon get themselves into gear, they do things properly and so it has come to pass: their campaign has been long planned. The majority of Apple’s lossless music is of a higher bit rate (quality) than qobuz’s typical ‘HD’ offering of 44hz/24bit (hardly high def) and sounds as good, if not better. It is of course significantly cheaper too. Amazon are taking a similar quality stance.
With Tidal, Deezer and qobuz having only around 6% of the streaming market one has to ask how long those smaller companies will be in business?
I am a great believer in small businesses and do everything possible to support them, but they need to deliver a quality product. The logical question “Why is Audirvana Studio not providing proper support for Apple / Amazon / Spotify?” Legacy mode has not worked properly for years - when will we see something better?
Why are you sure the lack of support is from Audirvana? Roon is not a small company and does not support these services. I think the major parties want complete control over the use of the UI and content. Third party software does not fit in with that.
Not so Jim. SDK (software developer kits) are freely available to allow integration of Apple Music and Spotify into applications like Studio. Strangely Amazon is more reluctant, which is surprising as integration encourages subscriptions.
To be fair to developers there was little value until the advent of lossless, high bitrate ‘HD’ music, but this has been coming for a long time.
Apple is not only providing SDK to third developers to integrate Apple Music to their players, it also offers them incitement to do so. Apple will give them a percentage of subscriptions, if the subscription to Apple Music is made from their player. So there’s reason to believe that Audirvana, Roon and other players will integrate Apple Music.
As someone else said “Never say ‘never’” I think integration of the major music platforms into Studio and probably Room too, will be essential to their survival.
I think so to. Fingers crossed they’ll integrate in both. At present my Roon sub will expire in a couple of months as I cant use it as i only Stream. As for Audirvana Studio I cant even get it to work on my headless Mac Mini without an SysOp error.
As Apple lets developers integrate Apple Music to their player, there should be, in a few months to a year, cheap offers of players, on the App Store and the Microsoft Store, that support Apple Music and sound better than iTunes.
And as Apple Music is cheap and has a bigger catalog of Hi Res than Qobuz and Tidal, these two streamers and all the players that rely exclusively on them will suffer from this competition.
@HiRes - Your statement “When Apple and Amazon get themselves into gear, they do things properly” - I thought Apple’s launch of hi-res was pretty far from proper. Also - the SDK you mention, I assume is Musickit - it is not appropriate for platforms like audirvana, roon and third party manufactures like Yamaha, Pioneer, Bluesound and others.
Apple Music streamed hit bitrate music from launch day. Music indicates correctly the exact bitrate of the track that is playing (cross checked with my DAC) and from launch there seems to be a far higher proportion of genuine high bitrate music than say, qobuz ie a minimum of 48/24 or higher versus 44/24 for much of the music on qobuz. This all leads me to the conclusion that ‘they did things properly’ from day 1.
Amazon appear to follow a similar path, although I am not personally a fan.
The SDK was linked. If you are a programmer, I suggest you check it yourself. I have no reason to believe it will not work for Audirvāna.
NAIM seem to be confident in their support for Apple Music, both in their streamers and in their apps, so I see no reason why others cannot follow.
