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Weekend poll: Do you use a hi-fi music streaming service?
Or are you sticking with standard quality?
Although it seems like the market has largely settled on a couple of flagship options, there's no shortage of ways to stream your favorite songs these days. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music — these are just a handful of the apps you can download from the Play Store right now before diving into curated playlists and new releases. If you really want to get the most out of your music library, though, you'll need higher-quality audio. You can always turn to local playback, but if you'd rather stick to streaming, plenty of existing plans deliver precisely that.
Snapdragon Sound's new lossless audio won't just sound better, it might stop your Bluetooth buds from cutting out all the time
Qualcomm's certification and the new aptX Lossless hide a pretty good perk
Bluetooth audio is hardly cutting-edge. Bargain bin buds can be had these days for $15 on sale, and folks buy them in droves. But they're not all created equal — different models and different phones support different standards with different qualities. Qualcomm, with its fingers in basically every part of the smartphone pie, decided earlier this year to roll out a new Snapdragon Sound certification: a single badge you could look for that means "this thing does the good audio stuff." And today, the company has announced that Snapdragon Sound will support lossless CD-quality audio, which is all the rage these days now that Apple Music has it. But, even if you don't care about better audio quality, there's actually a tiny, hidden benefit to this change that I'm actually even more excited for.
Apple Music's latest update delivers lossless and spatial audio for 'compatible devices'
Your playlists have never sounded so crystal clear
Spotify may be the reigning champion of streaming music, but it's far from the only choice. Apple Music is a surprisingly competent app even on Android, and some of its recent additions make it an even better service. In May, Apple added lossless and spatial audio to its service at no additional cost, and with its latest app update, both are finally coming to Android.
While it doesn't affect those of you who have no idea what FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is, today's Android 3.1 announcement (see the SDK release here) will make a lot of people who gave up MP3s for FLAC files happy. Forget happy - think ecstatic. Unlike MP3s, FLAC is a lossless codec, meaning it does not degrade in quality after compression, making it the perfect solution for audiophiles who really care about the quality of their sound.