![]() There are iOS and desktops apps, but Apple Music is not Android friendly. ![]() ![]() Files are in AAC (high quality but still compressed), and Apple says it has more than 45 million tracks online. What’s the difference? Tidal’s high-fidelity sound is only available on the premium tier, and this means that for, $19.99/mo, you’ll be able to listen to CD-quality music using the Free Lossless Audio Codec or ‘FLAC’Īpple Music: This service is aimed at Apple users, and it fits well into the Apple ecosystem. Tidal costs $9.99 a month for the standard service and $19.99 for the ‘premium’ service. Tidal also has a lower priced option of streaming at 320 kbps to match. There’s a CD-quality tier, and a high-resolution tier with higher prices. Tidal is supported on iOS, Android, web browsers, some home components, and desktop computer apps. Tidal has about 50 million tracks, and more than 30,000 in high-resolution. ![]() Tidal: Tidal streams FLAC files, very high quality audio that is lossless (no compression). Since CDs have a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and a bit depth of 16-bit, and Hi-res files have a sampling rate ranging between 96 kHz and 192 kHz at 24-bit, the better-than-CD quality spec is the target that the best streaming sources aim for. Hi-res audio is: “Lossless audio that is capable of reproducing the full range of sound from recordings that have been mastered from better-than-CD quality music sources.” Higher than CD quality – termed Hi-res – is defined by The Digital Entertainment Group (in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Association and The Recording Academy) as the following: There isn’t a strict definition of high fidelity in streaming, but basically it refers to uncompressed music of at least CD quality. In general, when played through computer speakers or smartphones, the sound was good enough, but if the system were to grow, the quality needed to improve. They were more like AM radio, but they worked, and they satisfied a music-hungry market. The earliest streaming services weren’t high fidelity. Soon, other devices picked up on the demand for streaming music, with companies like Sonos, Bluesound, and Denon offering dedicated streamers that could replay the Internet streams on your favorite devices at home, and create whole-house systems where music could be streamed to multiple rooms. The services were also available on our smartphones, so we could listen there, ane by streaming from those devices, we could listen in our cars and on our home audio devices. With the Internet in most homes, and with the proliferation of Wi-Fi, traditional home devices like receivers were increasingly offering Internet access for firmware updates, and access to audio streaming services. As the Internet has improved, giving us more bandwidth, the quality of the music streams has improved, offering us CD quality and beyond, but at a price. That was the beginning of the myriad offerings we have today. With growing success, Pandora and other services added ads between songs, or offered ad-free music for a fee. Pandora and its cousins were computer-based, so people listened on their desktops or laptops getting the music they liked as long as they had the Internet. It wasn’t quite the same as creating your own playlists out of your owned music library, but it was convenient if you had Internet access, and it often exposed you to music you might have never discovered on your own. Both services streamed music at fairly low quality and were based on algorithms that observed the kind of music or artists you liked and fed you more. Eventually, after much public pressure, Apple removed the copy protection from their downloads.Īround the same time, Pandora appeared, along with LastFM. Rather than only downloading albums, you could buy music individual tracks. As storage sizes increased, people could carry their entire music collection on an iPod.Īll this ripping of music didn’t thrill the music publishers, or artists, so Apple opened the iTunes Store to allow people to buy anything in a protected format the music industry could live with. 2001 was also the year of the iPod, a hard disc music player that could take files ripped from a CD right on your computer. By 2001, Napster had millions of users, and the music industry began to rightfully worry. While Napster wasn’t a streaming service, it built a wide audience based on a highly compressed music file format, MP3 (320 kbps kilo-bits-per-second), and Napster offered a free peer-to-peer service where anyone could contribute ripped music files (from CD, vinyl or tape) and share them to friends or anonymously. I’d put the beginning of the streaming age with the rise of Napster in the late 90’s. ![]()
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