Apple Music to support lossless audio and spatial audio, Dolby Atmos.
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Worth noting that lossless support is part of the base product; thereâs no upcharge.
+1 for Apple Music support.
With the new lossless service, the more direct the route into decent playback gear, the better (ie as opposed to via airplay from a phone).
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We would love to integrate Apple music, but so far we could not access any SDK that makes it possible⌠An SDK is the part we need to understand how to talk with a service and stream audio from it. Usually we receive directly from the service which allows us to access it
Will the volumio handle Apple Music +
+1 Hope Apple makes the sdk public soon, certainly with hifi coming 
If/when integration for these big streaming apps are available (i.e. apple music, amazon, youtube), will they be exclusive to Volumio premium like Tidal and Qobuz integration?
very likely, because these kind of integrations require substantial development & testing effort and then there is also a certification process involved in some of the cases. All-in-all very time consuming and not always as easy as it looks.
The SDK looks available for download under the âandroidâ section
https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?=Android%20MusicKit
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I hope also someone develop a plugin for apple music, now I can only stream cd quality with airplay. Good enough but hi-res playback would be nice.
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Are we sure it is lossless with Airplay ?
Just tried the much rumoured âlosslessâ music via the Apple Music app on iPhone, using Airplay on my Volumio powered DAC. In the new iOS version (14.6) you should first enable lossless downloads and playback in Preferences > Music. Not all available albums are in lossless format yet, but Apple promises that by the end of this year this will be fixed. So how does it sound? Definitely as HD (CD quality), so a significant improvement in many cases. A smaller selection of albums is available in bitrates up to 24 / 192 kHz, but read John Darkoâs worthwhile note on why for now it remains rather theoretical to properly feed all these bits in your hifi system. It is nice to see that Volumio correctly displays the cover art of music played in the Apple Music app. Still, if one day integration in Volumio would become possible this would be much nicer of course. Hope Spotify will follow soon with lossless, as I prefer the interface of their app more, and actually also the company itself.
Apple describes on their support pages that one can get highres (24/196) music out of an iPhone by using their lightning to USB dongle and an external DAC. Darko demonstrates this using a Dragonfly USB DAC. Would it be in any way possible to feed this signal into a Rpi4/DAC hat combination (e.g. RaspDAC Mini LCD)? Just holding off buying the dongle until Iâm sure it will work⌠Thanks!
i think you mean 24bit 96khz⌠and yes the dragonflyâs can do that. and you could just put the dragonfly into your pi and with mini jack to your system⌠but getting a signal into a pi would need a abo of volumio how to do that i donât know most of the time itâs out of the rpi
but why putting it back into a rpi? dragonfly dac already gives a good soundâŚ
btw ali express has cheap usb dacs and sound even as good⌠4 less ( dutch habbit )
btw i have 3 dragonflyâs black, red and cobalt⌠i bought them before this was released.
Hi DVO, thanks for your reply. Sorry, I meant 24-bit/192kHz, which is the highest quality that (some) of Apple Music tracks are coded in. I do have a Volumio Superstar abo, but I was just wondering if the iPhone +USB/Lightning dongle connected via USB to the Pi/DAC would show up in Volumio just like an external sound card (I tried an older Griffin iMic USB, which is indeed correctly recognised by Volumio as a sound card, but it is quite old does not seem to support high bitrates). I donât have a Dragonfly lying around (they seem quite nice though, but like you say quite expensive too). In my opinion, a Pi+DAC-hat could qualify as an âexternal DACâ, as described by Appleâbut there their support stops. It seems that the company is not really interested in HiRes, and even does not provide proper support of it. They seem much more concerned with hyping the Dolby Atmos format, which locks users even further in their ecosystem.
dragonfly dac go to 96khz not 192khzâŚ
(Red), 44.1kHz (Green), 48kHz (Blue), 88.2kHz (Amber), 96kHz (Magenta), MQA (Purple)
a dac hat can go higher than the dragonflyâs all flyâs sound good black, red a bit warmer and cobalt a
little bit clearer but itâs a little bit not a big difference.
dolby atmos is more movie soundâŚ
I did not know that. This makes it even more sad, because this means then that so far there is no straightforward way to get the 24/196 tracks out of Apple Music without any downsampling involved. I hope (but do not expect soon) that Apple will come up with a workable solution. Knowing Apple, this will involve new hardware, made by⌠Apple.
I am in of s/o could build a plug in for Apple Music. Would spend easily 20Euro to buy it.
Apple openly announced that 24/192 will only be available via a DAC.
Volumio, Cambridge, etc are ideal,platforms to realize an own plugin.
Who will have it first and can convince apple to support with a marketing message will get the business with the apple hifi enthusiasts.
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Personally I donât think that an Apple music plugin should be a high priority. Only about 8% of their catalog is 24bit/96kHz or better. Airplay handles a claimed 16bit/48kHz so lossless will come through. I am unsure if it resamples everything to 48k or not, but by and large you are getting at least CD quality. Until they bump up the real hi-res portion of catalog to a more significant portion or until Apple shows they are a little more willing to work with smaller developers, Iâd put it on the back burner.
Now I personally like the Apple eco system, I have macs, Apple TV, and an iPhone, but they clunked the music app. It still doesnât support sample rate switching on the desktop version, itâs too walled in, and itâs hobbled on most of the supported devices. Iâm ok with using Airplay till they get it sorted and increase the hi-res portion of their library(which they havenât shown much interest in doing).
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