Lossless Audio has officially arrived at Apple Music

Apple Music subscribers are now able to listen to music and audio content in high fidelity with the official introduction of Lossless Audio.

The feature, which launched in the wake of Apple’s Spatial Audio feature and record label discovery pages on Monday, is now fully rolled out across both mobile and desktop applications and comes at no extra cost to Apple Music subscribers.

Over 75 million songs on the streaming service will be available to Apple Music customers to listen to in Lossless, a file format revered by audiophiles due to its top-tier sound quality.

Through utilising Apple’s Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) coding format, Apple Music’s Lossless Audio catalogue promises to preserve the integrity of the original audio file as a CD-quality .m4a, subverting the digital compression typically encountered on other streaming services or when listening to mp3s.

This essentially allows listeners to listen to songs as they were created in the studio, with Lossless Audio retaining all the nuances and dynamics of the song’s original masters.

To engage the feature, Apple Music users can turn on Lossless Audio through accessing Settings > Music > Audio Quality on their listening device, which will then present a range of different resolutions to suit their network connections status.

Users can then listen to Lossless Audio on Apple Music by using a wired connection to headphones, powered speakers or a digital-to-analogue converter (for songs with sample rates higher than 48kHz), with inbuilt iPhone, Mac or iPad speakers also being capable of outputting Lossless Audio.

However, it’s worth noting that regular Bluetooth connections don’t support lossless formats, and only Apple’s AAC Bluetooth Codec (integrated in AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and Beats wireless headphones) will allow for wireless lossless listening.

Streaming Lossless Audio also uses significantly more data than regular audio streaming, with higher audio resolutions resulting in higher data usage.

Find out more about engaging with Lossless Audio on Apple Music here.