iTunes radio - Bit Rate and recording

I'm curious as well what the bit rate is for iTunes Radio and am suprised Apple hasn't published it.

Forbes.com is doing a followup story soon which will compare iTunes Radio, Spotify and Pandora that you may want to check out.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/amadoudiallo/2013/09/18/apple-releases-itunes-radio- a-pandora-alternative/

Amadou Diallo, Contributor 1 day ago

Apple has a history of withholding geek-oriented specs on consumer-oriented products. By their silence I think we can assume that it’s not higher than what Pandora’s max setting offers. And it certainly wouldn’t make sense for the rate to be greater than the 256 kbps of iTunes purchases.

There’s also the possibility that Apple is offering adaptive rates depending on whether a user is connected over WiFi or cellular.

I’m working on a story comparing aspects of iTunes Radio, Pandora and Spotify (stay tuned) and I’ll report on whether there’s an audible difference between them.

Also found a post on Macrumors by someone who did their own "test" yesterday who is suggesting that it is 256 kbps similar to what you get for iTunes purchases.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1639713

Money and "value" aside, I've been listening to iTunes Radio for a day now on my Denon AVR and B &W surround sound system via airplay streaming to my AppleTV and it sounds as good as Pandora One -- and I think the playlist alogorithim is superior to Pandora as I'm hearing a bunch more variety and music I like on a station I created similar to one I have on Pandora.

I don't record.

I understand there is a sharware app PandoraJam that lets you record Pandora content to iTunes (not sure how that is legal?).

I do regularly purchase music from iTunes as it's worth it to me to legally own stuff I really like and it is higher quality than I get from Pandora One (256 vs 192 kbps).

It appears as though the sound quality of iTunes radio is the same quality as the song you'd purchase. See here: http://www.pooraudiophile.com/2013/07/itunes-radio-bitrate.html

This probably doesn't help, since my use of Pandora and iTunes radio differs from yours, but I have found iTunes radio by far better: Believe or not the algorithms are better so that where Pandora gets off on tangents -- Who knows why it picked what it picked? -- iTunes has yet to have that problem for me. This ongoing problem with Pandora becomes complicated because on free Pandora, which I use, you can only skip so many songs every 24 hours. Sometimes Pandoa will play odd song after odd song and I do not have enough "skips" to go on to something that I like, and I have to turn the radio off for a day. For one of my stations Pandora got off on such a bad selection tree that I couldn't skip enough songs, and I finally had to delete an entire station that I had had for several years.

Beyond that, the ads are much more intrusive and frequent on free Pandora than on iTunes radio. For me, at least, the choice has been easy.

Pandora has licensed only 1 Million songs. Apple has licensed over 20 MILLION songs. Apple has a huge amount of variety available for iTunes Radio.

iTunes Radio also has 256 kbps quality songs you can listen to for FREE. Pandora allows you to listen to 64 kbps songs for free for limited amounts of time. And Pandora charges you $40 a year to get 192 kbps quality songs.

PandoraJam is a third party recorder that allows you to privately/semi-legally/illegally/pirated copy the individual Pandora songs for free. Pandora has nothing to do with PandoraJam - it breaks their license to the music if they associated with it.

iTunes Match for $25 a year is a service of Apple that allows Apple to legally replace all the songs in your iTunes collection - whether legally (purchased or ripped), or pirated versions - with 256 kbps AAC quality copies from the 20+ million song iTunes collection. These are non-DRM copies which you can keep. You can keep adding new songs as you purchase or obtain them and these will be upgraded to their iTunes versions.

An iTunes Match subscription also allows you to listen to iTunes Radio ad-free.

Additionally, artists get a much larger amount of money from iTunes Radio than from Pandora.

Thus, in the scheme of things, iTunes Radio and iTunes Match is a much better buy than Pandora and is better for the music industry.

I suspect the bitrate is > PandoraOne. I have been doing some comparisons, and I prefer the audio from itunes radio better, though I could not do immediate same/song A/B comparison. Howsever, I really disagree that the "algorithm" for selecting tunes is better for itunes over Pandora. Its clear to me that there's a deeper catalog on itunes, certainly for Jazz and classical. But I tried to duplicate my Pandora One Jazz Piano greats station seeded with 60 or so artists. My Pandora station is great overall but repeats a lot. But I cannot even get more than 10 artists seeded on my itunes station before it stops playing altogether. Then, when it does play, it only occasionally plays the artists I seeded, though it usually plays Jazz. I started a Bela Fleck station, and got very little banjo or bluegrass, but I did get Celine Dion! and much of the music matched that Las Vegas lounge stuff rather than Fleck's eclectic banjo and bluegrass. I seeded a station with Bartok as an artist and Bartok Quartet tracks, and settled in for some classical listening, and got absolutely jarred by Ethel Merman belting out "There's no business like show business". I am not kidding you! I just hope the bugginess and selection improve. I suspect they will. There is great potential here as I have seen tracks from a lot of albums and artists that I never knew existed. That was rare for me on Pandora One, Slacker, and Spotify.

Somewhere on a apples website it stated that iTR Match had a bit rate of 192k, I believe. Did it find anything on the free version

If your ear can't detect the bitrate of iTunes Radio, then It doesn't matter to you. The exact number only serves as a placebo effect to fool the brain into perceiving quality. Take a 128 kbps music file. Play it to your mother, but tell her it's 64 kbps. Then play it to your father, but tell him it's 320 kbps. Your mother will say it sounds bad. Your father will say it sounds good. The bottom line is you should judge the value of iTunes Radio by what your ears hear, not what a number tells your ears to hear.

I can guarantee that iTunes radio is NOT 256k.

I am listening to radio right now, on a hardwaird 50MB connection.

Just listened to a song.

Clicked the but-it-now link.

Downloaded.

BIG diference.

Here's what Sony's Music Unlmited says:

Click the HQ Audio ON button within your account settings and each song will be delivered as a super high quality 320kbps AAC file. Turn the feature off to conserve your data usage. High Quality audio settings available on your gaming devices, mobile and web.

Seems alot better than iTunes. It's $9.99 per month but their salesman told me there should be a half price sale for a yearly subscription coming for the holidays. On my stereo system: B&W (lowest of the line) matrix speakers and Acurus amp and pre-amp there was a big difference between Pandora (standard) and Sony Premium, though little difference in my generic car system. I tested my hearing and don't hear above about 10-12 KHz or below 30 Hz and I think Pandora and probably iTunes are truncated even within this narrow range. The younger you are, assuming no damage, the more this should be apparent.

Well, now I have done a test, it looks about the same. Data transferred to iTunes = 8.8MB - size of the fle once downloaded - 7.7MB

JL-seems like you shoud be able to figure the bandwidth by Multiplying 7.7 MegaBytes(the file size) by 8 (# bits per Byte) to get the total number of bits which is= 61,600,000 for the download. Then divide by the number of seconds in the track to get the bits/second or bandwidth. So if the song were 3 minutes, the Bandwidth would be 342 Kbps. What do you get?

It looks like 256AAC - Both numbers are in MegaBytes.

I just read your comment/question, so forgive me for my tardiness.

I just did a little comparison. I do have a decent stereo system so it's fairly easy for me to differences.

I just did a few tests.

I have a AAC 256kbps song that I downloaded from iTunes.

The downloaded version sounded better than the iTunes Radio version.

I then compared to Spotify subscription and Spotify subscription is at 320kbps AAC. I don't know how to say this, but it sounded pretty darn close to the 256kbps AAC file that I downloaded from iTunes.

I then have another song which was a live performance of an eclectic big band with no audible amounts of audio compression or limiting, but most "pop" music has compression and limiting to some extent, which may alters the sound quality.

When I performed the comparison between Spotify 320kbps AAC and a 16/44.1 AIFF rip from a CD, there was no contest. AIFF sounded better, it had more clarity, better low level detail for the softer passages, and a little more accurate bass.

I just signed up for the 30 day trial period. I think Spotify did a decent job with the UI as it's pretty straightforward interface, I checked out a variety of songs and it appears to have decent versions. I did try Tidal, which is Lossless, but at the time when I tried it, it was just stopping to buffer too many times and I got annoyed and simply stopped using it. I have been having problems with my ISP and I've decided that until the ISP connection is better, that I'm not going to sign up for anything more than iTunes Radio right now and that's what I'm going to use because I listen to mostly my catalog of music which is predominately ripped from CDs to AIFF or I am starting to download 24 bit files from HDTracks, Bowers and Wilkins. 24 Bit files have more dynamic range and low level detail and a lot of the recordings (you have to watch out for this, because there are a few that are just the same as the CD and not worth the money, but that's only in rare incidences) have no compression, limiting as they mastered the tracks to be as close to the original masters than the CD versions.

If you have a decent ISP connection, a decent stereo, then you might want to check out Tidal and compare to Spotify. Tidal is more expensive, but it's lossless.