Ask HN: Why Apple is not launching hi-res (24bit) music downloads in iTunes? - anildigital
======
gaspoweredcat
hi res? they dont even offer lossless, which i actually found quite shocking,
while scouring the net for a few albums i couldnt find in lossless and having
always been a win/lin/android person i wasnt exactly keen on using itunes but
i thought "they have their own codec, ALAC but my player can handle it, ill
bite the bullet and sign up"

it was only after going through the hassle of setting it all up that i
discovered that they dont actually offer lossless for sale only as a ripping
option, why they dont offer it i have no idea when other providers manage to
do it just fine (bandcamp, 7digital, quobuz, ototoy and others)

and i have to argue with others there is a market for hi res audio, tidal just
didnt offer it correctly, the selection, app and marketing werent good enough
to justify the price, before tidal quobuz actually offered a lossless
streaming service too but like tidal it was expensive and somewhat limited,
plus in general people getting lossless tracks will often prefer to own the
albums, that way they can be played on sources that dont support connections
like stand alone DAPs

while i tried but dropped both tidal and quobuz streaming i would be happy to
pay a few extra quid on top of the cost of premium for a lossless version of
spotify.

lack of high bitrate i can kind of understand, not everything was mastered in
24bit but there should be CD quality lossless available for almost all tracks

id guess another possible reason for their not including 24bit files is the
new headphone system, bluetooth is ok and all but isnt the fastest or most
reliable standard im not sure about 4.1 but 4.0 has a max throughput of around
24mbps, a 320k (or even less aac or whatever apple use) will be much lighter
on bandwidth to those wireless headphones, a 24/192 (or worse a 32/384) file
would be seriously pushing the bandwidth available via bluetooth (yay, wasnt
dropping the 3.5mm jack a great idea!) itll change in time of course, it could
be mitigated through buffering and such but it would still hammer battery life
comparitively

------
Jonnax
How do they market it? Tidal showed that people don't really care. A lot of
people don't mind selecting max quality, I'm sure the extra bandwidth cost is
another factor.

------
Esau
For the same reason that lossless is not the default - most people can't hear
the difference.

