Digital

Apple working on “adaptive streaming” format

By | Published on Wednesday 29 February 2012

Apple

Following his recent criticisms of the sound quality of modern music formats, Neil Young spoke at last month’s D: Dive Into Media conference in the US about his efforts to improve the audio quality of digital music, and was quoted by Rolling Stone as saying: “Steve Jobs [was] a pioneer of digital music, and his legacy is tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl. And you’ve got to believe that if he’d lived long enough, he would have done what I’m trying to do”.

And according to The Guardian, he may have already started the ball rolling prior to his death last October. The paper claims that Apple is developing an “adaptive streaming” audio format, which would vary the quality of audio delivered to iCloud users based on bandwidth available and the type of device being used, allowing better quality sound when bandwidth and device allow.

The format will, seemingly, be used as part of the iTunes Match service. Launched earlier this year, Match scans a user’s music library, giving access to any track also available in the iTunes store as 256kbps AAC audio files, which can be downloaded to replace the local copy of the file, regardless of its encoding quality or source. It is thought that Apple’s new format could offer users access to files in much higher quality still.

“All of a sudden, all your audio from iTunes is in HD rather than AAC. Users wouldn’t have to touch a thing – their library will improve in an instant”, a source told The Guardian.

Although Apple refused to comment on the matter, Ars Technica last week reported that the company is now encouraging rightholders to deliver music to iTunes as 24-bit/96KHz studio quality files – higher than that delivered by a CD.

Read The Guardian’s article here.



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