Airport Express is a discontinued model. So it would be difficult to say if that works or not, or give it any reason to be tested for an item the mass market doesn’t own. based on the first one which includes airplay it probably only covers the lowest setting AAC256.
It’s been a couple of distraction-filled weeks, so I’ve only had a day or so to fiddle with this, but I did get around to getting the basics of this working.
Remaining tasks include some timing-related changes, to make the output rate change seamless and to ensure its all using approved APIs/interfaces.
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Mac or IOS? I gave up on Mac
This is for macOS.
It’s not needed on iOS.
Should have known, it was a given. How did you get itunes to change output rate based on music without involving the midi program? I found the random crap (randomly assigning an output to an album on every bit of music you choose) shoot didn’t work for me.
I built an application to do it (ah, the life-long benefits of learning to code when I was but a nipper).
Basically, it watches the current AV player, gets the metadata for the Now Playing track, and issues a couple of API calls (just as the Audio MIDI Utility does) to reset the output rate on the fly.
If I can make it work in a manner compatible with App Store requirements, I’ll throw it up there. If not, I’ll make the Git repository public and you can build it from code yourself.
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That’s pretty cool! Does your app work with local files as well or just from Apple Music?
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Not a coder myself, dabbled in programming but was never my niche. I had a suspicion you were going to say you wrote a program for it. Always been more on the hardware side of the world.
It doesn’t care what the source is, but as implemented currently it only watches the Apple Music application. So, if you played something from any other player it won’t see the track changes, or even know anything is playing.
It could, relatively easily, be adapted to watch any application that integrates with the macOS “Now Playing” functionality.
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Great work, is the app available yet or code in a git repo? Really keen to try it out, it solves my only issue with Apple Music on Mac.
Not yet.
I got it working seamlessly … and then while looking at how to make a couple of low-level bits app-store-policy compliant, I got distracted with more interesting (to me) fiddling.
I won’t make the Git repository public unless I can’t get it in a state that it can be published via the App Store (which presumes nothing in Monterey renders it irrelevant).
Thats cool, I was thinking about writing something similar but as always never enough time, only started to look at the required APIs. Good luck with the publish. Not sure Apple will ever address the issues, so could be a good little earner, I know I would be happy to pay for it as now seems silly to spend time on something knowing there is a working solution out there. Keep us posted.
Went back to working on this for a bit.
Think I have it to a point where it should pass app-review. I guess we’ll see in a few days …
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Thank you for the update, still keen as anything to give it a go. Been using Qobuz in the meantime.
A month of using Apple Music and me and my whole family miss Tidal.
My family misses the recommendations of Tidal for new content. I heard people complain about Tidal pushing hip hop, but Apple just keeps pushing pop music and new pop releases to me. IDGAF.
The iTunes integration is clunky and slow on Windows. I miss Tidal’s stand-alone app. Apple’s browser experience is solid however.
I have had many more problems with Apple Music on my iPhone than I ever had with Tidal.
-Songs freezing after 15 seconds. Requiring phone reboot.
-Downloaded files being inaccessible or incomplete in “offline mode”, or during airplane travel.
-cracking and skipping songs in Apple CarPlay.
“Recently added” tracks and albums is how I sort through new music I added. Tidal’s interface is more text heavy and better for scrolling through content faster.
I miss the MQA sound, but I also like Spatial Audio.
Apple has much better podcasts and non-song music content. It has lyrics too which eliminated a main benefit of Roon for me.
Apple’s radio function seems to curate and play similar content to my library better.
The family plan pricing was the reason I left Tidal for Apple and it is still the main reason I’m sticking with Apple. If Tidal lowers its price, me and my family would be ready to catch the wave again…even if it’s just going to disappear into the sea eventually.
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You downloaded the song. You probably are not on the latest update. This was a known bug.
One of the biggest reasons I have stuck with apple is their smart stuff always worked better for me. My “station” is the majority of my listening time. Playing lots of my favorite music and introducing new music it thinks I would like. Of course, apple has had 20 years of reading my thoughts to get it right. 
I will say that apple music on the mac is bad. So many problems. The iphone has been great.
Just wanted to help with the 15 second thing. It should be fixed now.
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This is standard operating procedure for most or all providers. Tidal pushes Hip Hop, Apple pushes pop. Amazon HD and Google/Youtube music push radio stations in the style of Spotify. Youtube music often focuses on videos (naturally), and Amazon HD always turns on autoplay forever with each update.
The vendors do this apparently to (1) keep you listening for longer periods, (2) push less popular artists into your stream to promote them [is this paid advertising?], and (3) control overhead by keeping many/most listeners on shared streams. Furthermore, they sometimes enforce volume normalization to gloss over poor quality tracks and smooth the streaming experience. The quality can be sharply lower on autoplay or videos than when the same material is selected one-by-one.
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Thanks for tip on updating. I just did latest iOS update. Fingers crossed.
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Ian - Did you ever complete this app?
It got kicked back to me, and I got the distinct impression it was due to it about to be redundant functionality (against which there are rules).
So, I decided to wait to see if Monterey addressed it; which it doesn’t (yet).
I haven’t had a chance to look at it since then (I was traveling for most of November).