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Apple May Turn Streaming Music Quality Up to 11

Apple already has experience with high-res audio, but expensive data plans may stymie widespread adoption.

Apple may use high-resolution audio to differentiate Apple Music from the rest of the pack.

Following the conclusion of the Portable Audio Festival this weekend in Japan, Japanese Mac blog Macotara reports that the Cupertino, California company is developing a high-resolution streaming audio format for Apple Music that's penciled in to debut in 2016.

The format would be able to stream up to 96kHz/24-bit music—well beyond the 44.1kHz/16-bit of a CD, and well beyond what you'll find on rival streaming music services like Spotify and Google Play Music (but not Tidal).

Longtime Apple watchers will know that the company does, in fact, have experience with high-resolution audio. In 2004, alongside iTunes 4.5, Apple debuted Apple Lossless, a high-resolution audio format that compressed sound files to roughly half of their original size without degrading the quality. (To give you a better idea of just how far back in computing history we're talking, the iTunes Music Store, as it was then called, had just turned one year old.) The Apple Lossless file format is still around—it was even open sourced in 2011—but the files are not sold on iTunes, and you have to dig into iTunes' settings to rip your CDs into the format.

While streaming obviates the need for much on-board storage, users would still have to contend with larger data consumption than they're currently used to—unless "zero-rating" schemes like T-Mobile's Music Freedom, in which data from select apps (including Apple Music) are not counted against your data cap, are adopted by wireless carriers across the board. And that's if the FCC even allows those arrangements to continue.

Whether or not the human ear can even appreciate the difference between high-resolution audio formats and their lossy cousins is a debate that continues to this very day.