Pop the streamers 🎉 and pour the champagne 🥂 because this single check box signifies the beginning of the end of the lossy digital audio era, kickstarted by Napster file-sharing in 1999 and then legalised and legitimised by Apple’s iTunes store in the record label panic that ensued: 99 cents for a song, delivered in 256kbps AAC to preserve bandwidth and storage.īefore the year is out, every song in Apple Music’s 70 million-strong arsenal should be available to stream in CD quality. A few titles might even show up in 24bit/48kHz.

Tick it and Apple Music streams will come down the pipe in uncompressed 16bit/44.1kHz, CD-quality audio. The latest (11.4) macOS update rolling out to users this week adds a lossless audio option to the Music app’s preferences pane.