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Apple will finally allow Apple Music users to adjust their audio quality

Allowing users to choose the quality of the music they’re listening to is one of those features that’s so obvious to include in a music streaming app that many people were confused when Apple didn’t have it in Apple Music. The service originally played songs at 256kbps on Wi-Fi and lowered the quality when a device was using cellular networks. While that’s good because it uses less data, some of us don’t really have to worry about using too much data and Apple has finally decided to give these people the option to adjust their audio quality. 

One of the strangest decisions Apple made in creating Apple Music was the company’s initial refusal to let users choose the audio quality that songs stream at. Eddy Cue has tweeted that quality varies depending on whether you’re listening on Wi-Fi and cellular; presumably this means Apple Music streams at its maximum bitrate of 256kbps (AAC) when you’re on a decent Wi-Fi network. But on a mobile network, what you’re hearing could be at a lower quality — and there’s currently no way to adjust it. Thankfully, Apple Insider reports that’ll be changing with the release of iOS 9. In the third developer beta of the new software, released earlier today, Apple has added a toggle to the Music settings menu that lets you listen at “high quality” on cellular networks no matter how strong your signal may be. Right beneath the option, Apple warns that enabling it will “use more cellular data and songs may take longer to start playing.” Interestingly there’s nothing about pauses or buffering in that text, so Apple Music may cache enough of a song to ensure there are no random interruptions once it starts playing.

What do you think?

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Written by Connor Livingston

Connor Livingston is a tech blogger who will be launching his own site soon, Lythyum. He lives in Oceanside, California, and has never surfed in his life. Find him on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

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