“Apple Music doesn’t debut until June 30, but already there are loads of perceptions about the service, and certainly music quality is an important issue. What we do know is that it’ll be very much based on Beats Music intermixed with Apple’s own unique bag of tricks,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “How it fares against such market leaders as Spotify won’t be known for a while, but it’s a sure thing Apple is working with a huge advantage, some 800 million credit cards registered with iTunes, and a three-month free trial.”

“Typical of Apple’s critics, they can come up with some pretty outlandish stuff to argue about, so there was a report from a CNN blogger the other day claiming that Apple would be delivering music with poorer quality audio with Apple Music. How so? Well, it seems that Beats Music streams 320K MP3 tracks, whereas Apple offers 256K AAC,” Steinberg writes. “Without actually thinking any further, the CNN blogger subtracts 256 from 320, sees a gap and pronounces the audio quality inferior. Now it so happens that AAC (short for Advanced Audio Coding) is a higher efficiency codec. So the smaller audio files from Apple should deliver identical sound quality.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Yes, as we wrote earlier this month:

Apple Music will be streaming its tracks at a lower bitrate, not a lower quality.

That’s good for your ears as well as your data plan.

SEE ALSO:

CNN blows it, erroneously claims Apple Music will ‘sound worse’ than competition – June 11, 2015
AAC: Apple’s preferred audio codec – July 18, 2014
Apple discusses AAC vs. MP3 codecs; 128 kbps AAC as good or better than 160 kbps MP3 – April 29, 2003