How to Get the Highest Audio Quality From Apple Music Downloads

Here’s a mildly annoying truth about Apple Music: the service includes some of the best audio quality in streaming — full lossless, even Hi-Res Lossless up to 24-bit/192 kHz — at no extra cost, and yet a huge number of subscribers never hear it. Not because their ears aren’t good enough, but because the settings default to lower quality, the downloads they made months ago are stuck at the old setting, or their playback chain quietly caps what reaches their ears.

Getting the absolute best sound out of Apple Music downloads is mostly a matter of flipping the right switches and avoiding a handful of silent quality killers. This guide walks through all of it: the settings, the tiers, what your gear can and can’t do, and how to make sure the files you keep are as good as the files you stream.

Know the quality tiers you’re choosing between

Apple Music delivers audio at several quality levels, and knowing them makes every setting below make sense:

High Quality (256 kbps AAC). The standard tier, and what most people hear by default. It’s a well-encoded lossy format that sounds very good on everyday gear — genuinely transparent to most listeners on typical earbuds.

Lossless (up to 24-bit/48 kHz ALAC). Bit-for-bit identical to the master at CD-and-above resolution. No data discarded. This is where “highest quality” starts for most practical purposes.

Hi-Res Lossless (up to 24-bit/192 kHz ALAC). The top tier, with higher sample rates for the maximum data from the original master. The catch, covered below, is that hearing its full benefit requires specific hardware.

All the lossless content is encoded in ALAC, Apple’s lossless codec, and it’s all included in a normal subscription. The quality is there; you just have to turn it on.

Step 1: Set your streaming and download quality correctly

This is the single highest-impact thing in this article, because the defaults don’t give you the best quality.

On iPhone or iPad: Open Settings, go to Music, then Audio Quality. Turn on Lossless Audio. You’ll then see separate controls for cellular streaming, Wi-Fi streaming, and downloads — set Downloads to Lossless or Hi-Res Lossless depending on your storage tolerance and gear.

On Mac: Open the Music app, go to Settings, then Playback, and enable Lossless under Audio Quality.

On Windows: In the Apple Music app, the same options live under Settings and Playback.

The separate download setting matters more than people realize. You can stream at a lower quality to save data but have every download saved at maximum quality, which is usually the right combination: your offline library — the music you actually keep and listen to repeatedly — deserves the best version.

Step 2: Re-download your old music

Here’s the silent quality killer almost everyone misses. Changing the quality setting does not upgrade the songs you’ve already downloaded. Anything you saved before enabling Lossless is still sitting on your device at the old, lower quality, and it will stay that way forever unless you act.

The fix: delete the existing downloads for the albums and playlists you care about, then download them again. With the new setting active, Apple sends the lossless versions. It’s tedious for a big library, so prioritize the music you listen to most. But skip this step and your “lossless library” is quietly a mixed bag of old 256 kbps files wearing a lossless label in your head.

Step 3: Understand what your playback gear actually delivers

This is where honesty saves you money and confusion, because the file’s quality and the quality that reaches your ears are two different things.

Bluetooth can’t carry lossless. This surprises people every time: AirPods, and Bluetooth headphones in general, cannot transmit true lossless audio, because Bluetooth codecs compress the signal in transit. If you listen over Bluetooth, you’re hearing a lossy version regardless of what the file is. That doesn’t make lossless downloads pointless — the difference between tiers can still matter — but full lossless fidelity needs a wired connection.

Hi-Res needs an external DAC. The digital-to-analog converters built into phones and most computers typically top out around 24-bit/48 kHz. To play Hi-Res Lossless at its full 24-bit/192 kHz, you generally need an external DAC plus wired headphones or speakers capable of resolving the detail. Without that chain, downloading Hi-Res gets you bigger files, not better sound.

Match your downloads to your reality. If your listening is Bluetooth earbuds on a commute, the practical difference between tiers shrinks dramatically, and standard Lossless (or even 256 AAC) downloads are a reasonable choice that saves serious storage. If you’ve got a wired setup with a good DAC at home, Hi-Res earns its space. There’s no shame in either — just don’t pay the storage cost of Hi-Res for a chain that can’t reproduce it.

Step 4: Mind the storage trade-off

Lossless files are large, and Hi-Res files are much larger. A library that fit comfortably at 256 kbps AAC can balloon several-fold at lossless resolutions, and Hi-Res multiplies it again. On a phone with limited storage, that’s the real constraint you’ll hit.

Two practical strategies: set Downloads to standard Lossless rather than Hi-Res unless your gear genuinely benefits, and curate — download your true favorites at maximum quality rather than trying to fit everything. Your cloud library keeps the rest a tap away when you have signal.

Step 5: Keep the quality when you make files you own

Everything above applies to downloads inside the Apple Music app — which are DRM-locked and stop working if your subscription lapses. If part of your goal is keeping the highest-quality versions of your music permanently, as files you own, a few principles keep the quality intact through conversion:

Start from the lossless source. A converter can only preserve what it’s given. Enable Lossless first, or you’ll be converting from compressed audio, and no output setting can restore what was already discarded. The general mechanics are covered in this guide to converting Apple Music downloads, and the protection layer that makes a converter necessary is explained in this piece on protected Apple Music.

Choose the output format by purpose. For a maximum-fidelity archive, a lossless output (ALAC or FLAC) preserves everything. For portable everyday files, high-bitrate MP3 is the practical pick — and here the bitrate setting is everything. A free tool like Apl Music Downloader saves Apple Music songs as MP3 with clear audio, and choosing the 320 kbps option rather than a lower default is the difference between files that sound crisp and files that sound thin on good headphones. 320 kbps is MP3’s ceiling and the only setting worth using if quality is your goal.

Convert once, from the best source. Every lossy re-encode loses a little. Never convert MP3 to MP3, or bounce files through multiple formats. One clean conversion from the highest-quality source, at the highest output setting, then done.

Verify a track before batching. Check one converted file’s properties — bitrate, and for lossless outputs, bit depth and sample rate — before committing a whole library. Fixing a wrong setting after 500 songs is a bad evening.

Quick wins and myths, rapid-fire

Wired beats wireless for fidelity. If you own wired headphones, using them is the cheapest audio upgrade available.

Volume-limiting and EQ settings can color sound. Check whether Sound Check, EQ presets, or headphone safety limits are shaping your audio without you realizing. Neutral settings give you what the master actually sounds like.

“Lossless” badges don’t guarantee you’re hearing lossless. The badge describes the file; your settings and playback chain decide what you hear.

Bigger numbers aren’t automatically audible. Whether Hi-Res sounds different from standard Lossless on your setup is genuinely gear-dependent. Trust your ears over spec sheets — try both tiers on your actual equipment.

Old downloads don’t upgrade themselves. Worth repeating, because it’s the most common silent failure: re-download after changing quality settings.

A note on doing this responsibly

Converting music for your own personal, offline use generally sits in a different category from sharing or redistributing it, and Apple’s terms of service set their own rules separate from copyright law. There’s a clear discussion in this piece on whether it’s legal to convert Apple Music. Keep conversions for your own listening, never share or sell them, and follow your local rules.