Recording the stream is different. It’s like recording a radio station. On Mac, there a also utilities that can record the sound of any other application.
But first, they do it in real time, so it takes an hour to record an album. Second, the quality is not the same. They won’t record the MQA stream in Studio MQA, but in lossless at best. And third, with these utilities, you can save the sound in any format that you want. You have no obligation to save a Flac stream in Flac.
The files themselves, from Tidal, Qobuz or Apple Music, that you download to listen to them offline are protected by DRMs.
In my case, the recording was bit-perfect. In fact, I was doing the recording to test MQA. I was able to capture the MQA file in tack. I could play back the saved MQA file on my MQA DAC and get the “blue light”.
There are a lot of things wrong about MQA, but it is useful for bit-perfect tests.
I used Sound Forge Audio Studio and a Virtual Audio Cable (this is the sound driver). I think I used Roon as the front end. So then the path was Roon → VIrtual Audio Cable → Sound Forge. When all the bits were in Sound Forge, they could be saved as a FLAC file.
Sure, you don’t need these files, since you disabled MQA on your DAC. But IMO, recording the stream is not a theft, and it’s probably legal. It’s like recording a radio station or a TV program.
Their player for Mac, iTunes that became Music, always supported Hi res, but only in ALAC, AIFF and WAV formats. It does not support FLAC or DSD.
Now they stream Hi Res with Apple Music, but in the ALAC format.
They are going to release a new player for classical music. Hopefully it will support Flac and DSF.
Itunes with Pure Music does play Flac. This can still be used on an older Mac. They’ve been working on an update for a few years now, but I’m still hoping.
It was a different time. The beginning of the Computer audio that also became interesting for audiophiles. Actually, Roon or Audirvana makes much more sense to the user. I wonder if they see enough future to further develop PM. On the website that they are working on it, but all the attention at the moment is on the hardware.
There are dramatic improvements coming in our updates, unlike products which seem to have other priorities than CPU footprint minimization, even requiring purchasing a new computer to support their bloated CPU requirements. This illustrates a critical and important difference in design philosophies. The CPU requirements of our coming updates will actually be decreased - not increased; by doing more with less.
Before I give the wrong impression: It’s interesting that both Audirvana and Pure Music state that minimal processor load ensures better playback from the DAC.
And that endless fine-tuning of the code helps with this. This probably also increases the chance of a small error that causes the buffer handling to go wrong.
As far as I can tell, Roon is more in the Bits are bits corner. Which can also make it less critical.