ICloud – Does Apple Music store original ripped music in cloud

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I had a long talk with a guy from apple costumer help because of the notorious recent problems with Itunes/Apple Music. By the way he told me that if I have a big collection of music on my mac containing amongst other thing ripped music in a better quality then the usual 256 of Apple this would now, as part of Apple Music be stored in the cloud in its original (better!) quality. So when I have a second Mac with the same Apple ID I wouldn't need to copy anything from Itunes to this second Mac. To simply start a new Itunes folder on the second Mac would synchronize EVERYTHING. So after the necessary time my itunes on the second Mac would look exactly like the Itunes on my first. Is that really so? I couldn't find anything about that on Apple's description of Apple Music (and by the way, I don't have Itunes Match, but that's probably besides the point).

Best Answer

Actually, according to this Apple Music support page, lossless formats will NOT be preserved in the cloud:

"Songs encoded in ALAC, WAV, or AIFF formats will be transcoded to a separate temporary AAC 256 Kbps file locally, before they're uploaded to iCloud."

Meanwhile, the Apple Music product description states that they "compare every track in your collection to the Apple Music library to see if we have a copy. If we do, you can automatically listen to it straight from the cloud," which suggests that higher quality files do not, in fact, replace Apple's default in-cloud counterparts.

Sorry to dash your dreams. Maybe you could disguise the metadata on each of your files with slightly-off album names to prevent Apple from recognizing them, then use a higher quality file other than the formats mentioned above, which would be converted to AAC. Alternatively, Google Play's default bitrate is 320 kbps, and its uploading service is currently free.