Best music streaming service.

[tulak]

I’m also an Apple Music fan. I had a Spotify family account, but I never cared for their playlists.

Apple Music works great with Sonos and bluetooth in the car. I also enjoy their autogenerated playlists.

 

[ERD50]

Which of these allow you to create playlists or groups of *albums*?

I signed up for Qobuz because you get CD quality streams. But their playlists are just tracks. I want to create groups of *albums*.

You can save albums to your "Favorites", but that's one big glob. I need albums in groups for all the different genres I listen to.

-ERD50

 

[ERD50]

The biggest drawback with SiriusXM in the car is the quality of their music, noticeable difference between other music services that provide HD audio music streaming and what Sirius provides.

I was curious so did a search and I see similar complaints. Per wiki:

Bandwidth is separated into segments of 4-kilobit-per-second virtual "streams" which are combined to form audio and data "channels" of varying bitrates from 4 to 64 kilobits-per-second.[

64kbps is pretty awful. Even if you don't think you can hear the difference (and I admit, it often is not immediately obvious to me at first), I find that after listening to highly compressed music for 10 minutes or so, I get bored and want to turn it off.

To compress it, they have to remove some complexity from the music. That's just how it works. You may not notice it at first, but after a while, that missing complexity results in the music just sounding boring. Your brain senses there is something missing.

-ERD50

 

[PaunchyPirate]

Which of these allow you to create playlists or groups of *albums*?

I signed up for Qobuz because you get CD quality streams. But their playlists are just tracks. I want to create groups of *albums*.

You can save albums to your "Favorites", but that's one big glob. I need albums in groups for all the different genres I listen to.

-ERD50

Apple Music certainly does. They are called playlists. You name the playlist. You decide what songs go in them. You can add individual songs or entire albums at one time.

 

[OldShooter]

... Of course, my ears are 60+ years old. My 35yo son was visiting and raved about how much better Amazon and Tidal sounded. ...

This is real. As we age we lose high frequency hearing. Mine seemed to me to be gone above 8khz so I just went for a professional hearing test. Actually it falls off beginning more like 6khz.

The principal advantage to sound recorded at higher sampling rates and, to a degree, lossless recording schemes is more accurate reproduction at the higher frequencies. So I'm pretty sure my experience would be the same as @CoolRich59 and I don't doubt his son's report.

There are plenty of test tone recordings that can be downloaded and played on your home stereo equipment. Almost any equipment will give good reproduction at 8khz and somewhat higher. By the time you get to a 15khz test tone, though, inability to hear it might be due to your ears or to your equipment (manufacturer specs notwithstanding).

 

[Chuckanut]

I have found Pandora to be a great way to listen to music while doing things inside the home. Right now it is providing wonderful Christmas music as I write this.

I highly recommend the Il Volo (Holiday) Radio. The quality of the performers is very good.

 

[mpeirce]

I like Apple Music. We just plug our phone into our car stereo.

They create some terrific personalized channels for you.

Yeah, I listen to those often and often find good stuff I didn’t know about mixed in with old favorites.

I’m also amazed at how well “Siri, play some music” works for me. It not only knows what I like, but also seems to consider time of day for appropriate selections.

 

[mpeirce]

Apple Music does provide lossless music now. Much of it better than “CD-quality”.

Most audio compression techniques lose some amount of data contained in the original source file. Lossless compression is a form of compression that preserves all of the original data.

Apple has developed its own lossless audio compression technology called Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). In addition to AAC, the entire Apple Music catalog is now also encoded using ALAC in resolutions ranging from 16-bit/44.1 kHz (CD Quality) up to 24-bit/192 kHz.

While the difference between AAC and lossless audio is virtually indistinguishable, we’re offering Apple Music subscribers the option to access music in lossless audio compression.
​

 

[zinger1457]

Besides HD music Amazon also provides Ultra HD on some of heir songs, the Ultra HD does seem to have more pop to it, pretty sure I could tell the difference between a HD and Ultra HD song if doing an A/B test but haven't tried it. I download all the songs in my playlist (~400 songs) to my phone, seems like the highest quality available will be downloaded, about 20% of the songs in my playlist are Ultra HD.