I listen to a lot of my music these days in my car via the Music app on my iPhone 14 Pro Max using Apple CarPlay (wired). Much of the music consists of CD rips (44.1/16 ALAC) as well as downsampled hi-res music that I’ve purchased via the internet. Before copying them to my iPhone, I downsample the hi-res files to 48/24 because the iPhone reportedly can’t handle anything higher—or so I thought.
I wondered what would happen if I tried to copy an original hi-res file (96/24) to my iPhone directly, without downsampling it first: would it reject it outright, or would it downsample the file itself somehow? I tried that just now, and the whole file seemed to copy over intact, as far as I could tell. Looking at my iPhone music (via the Apple Music app) while the phone was plugged into my MBP, there wasn’t a way to verify the sampling rate of the file, but the file size showed that it was identical to the (huge) size of the original, hi-res file. Surprise!
So now that I’ve seemingly got a hi-res file on the Music app on my iPhone, would it play? The answer is YES: via CarPlay as well as via the iPhone’s tiny speakers. And it sounds pretty darned good in the car, too. So my question is, has Apple raised the limit as to the maximum sample rate that the iPhone Music app can handle? Or is my phone doing some automatic downconversion as it’s playing the file? I think that music can be streamed in hi-res via Apple Music, but it does seem that one can now transfer (sync) one's own hi-res files to the iPhone as well.
I wondered what would happen if I tried to copy an original hi-res file (96/24) to my iPhone directly, without downsampling it first: would it reject it outright, or would it downsample the file itself somehow? I tried that just now, and the whole file seemed to copy over intact, as far as I could tell. Looking at my iPhone music (via the Apple Music app) while the phone was plugged into my MBP, there wasn’t a way to verify the sampling rate of the file, but the file size showed that it was identical to the (huge) size of the original, hi-res file. Surprise!
So now that I’ve seemingly got a hi-res file on the Music app on my iPhone, would it play? The answer is YES: via CarPlay as well as via the iPhone’s tiny speakers. And it sounds pretty darned good in the car, too. So my question is, has Apple raised the limit as to the maximum sample rate that the iPhone Music app can handle? Or is my phone doing some automatic downconversion as it’s playing the file? I think that music can be streamed in hi-res via Apple Music, but it does seem that one can now transfer (sync) one's own hi-res files to the iPhone as well.
