Exciting news for music enthusiasts – Google’s VP of Engineering Dave Burke has revealed on Reddit that lossless audio support is coming to the Pixel 8 series. This means Pixel 8 owners will soon be able to experience pristine lossless music playback over USB.
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In the announcement, Burke explained that the new lossless mode will bypass the usual audio processing pipeline to preserve flawless fidelity. Music will be delivered bit-perfect without any quality loss during decoding or conversion steps.
This will allow Pixel 8 users with high-quality wired headphones and lossless music sources to enjoy stunning audio reproduction true to the original recording. No compromises or artifacts from compression.
Burke stated that lossless audio support will arrive on Pixel 8 models and other Android phones, but app developers must update their apps to enable output of lossless formats. Music services like Spotify already plan to support lossless streaming on Android.
The news aligns with Google adding lossless capability at the Android OS level in the recent Android 14 beta. With the plumbing in place, Pixel 8 owners eager to tap into lossless musical bliss won’t have to wait much longer.
In the Reddit AMA, Burke also touted optimizations in ART 14, the latest version of Android’s runtime environment. He claims new techniques like dead code elimination and compressed returns will reduce the size of compiled app code by up to 9.3% on average.
For a phone with 1GB of compiled code, this can save around 100MB of storage. Multiply by all installed apps and the storage benefits add up significantly. These gains arrive without impacting performance.
Android 14 will start rolling out later this year, but Pixel phones can gain ART 14 sooner via Mainline updates. The modular runtime optimization promises more efficient use of system resources.
Between lossless audio and a leaner codebase, Android 14 brings important upgrades for Pixel devices and Android in general. Google continues fine-tuning performance and capabilities with each new release.