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Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, you can't buy it. Only rent.

(I originally posted a reply that remarked that we can buy Apple Lossless music from iTMS - however I did a quick check and to my surprise Apple still doesn't offer DRM-free lossless content on iTMS: you can only get Apple Lossless by ripping your own CDs. The "Apple Digital Masters" products are not actually "masters": they're still compressed with lossy encoding: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/7/20758633/apple-digital-mas... - I guess this explains why services like Tidal and Pono are still around.

Knowing Apple, I think they probably wanted to offer lossless but the record companies are still paranoid about lossless copies... philistines.

It's not like Tidal is good either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc

Tidal offers FLAC. I don't completely understand the associated formats via their quality settings, but definitely have downloaded FLAC when caching content to a device.

Alright, yes, it uses the container, but files that are scrambled with MQA are worse quality than CD-rips. Even if no MQA decoding is involved.

> Knowing Apple, I think they probably wanted to offer lossless but the record companies are still paranoid about lossless copies... philistines.

You can buy digital lossless audio files on countless stores. Sure, iTunes is a different scale compared to Bandcamp, but buying lossless digital audio files isn't exactly new.

Apple has the digital music "selling" device, which is called iTune music. This complain is more like go to avis and complain they only rent cars but not selling them.

You can still “buy” albums digitally from Apple, and they are lossless, as they have been for almost-ever. The caveat being that you need a device capable of decoding ALAC files.

Alas, ALAC

I had a look and I don't believe that's the case - are you referring to "Digital Masters"? If so, then those are actually encoded with lossy encoding.

On second review, you’re right.

They have allowed you to rip your own music to lossless for more than 15 years, but I only just found out that when using iTunes Match, they cheat and only store a high-resolution but lossy version on their service.

Thanks!

That's not true. You can't buy lossless ALAC files from Apple.

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