Apple Music Radio Bitrate on macOS?

Question

Apple Music Radio Bitrate on macOS?

When I play Apple Music Radio on the macOS Music app, Activity Monitor shows approximately 380–425 kbps of continuous network download traffic.

I tested this with no other Music activity, no music library to synchronize, and the app minimized. When Music is idle, the traffic drops to essentially zero.

Could you please clarify:

What is the actual audio codec and bitrate used for Apple Music Radio on macOS?
Why does the Music app consume approximately 420 kbps of network data when the radio is playing?
Is the app downloading more than the currently playing audio stream, such as buffered or pre-fetched audio, multiple representations, or another stream?
Is the ~420 kbps figure expected behavior?

I am specifically trying to distinguish the actual encoded audio bitrate from the Music app's total network traffic.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 27.0

Gepostet am 07. Okt. 2026 01:10

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08. Okt. 2026 00:57 als Antwort auf emad98

I wouldn’t use the ~420 kbps shown in Activity Monitor as the audio bitrate. That’s the Music app’s total network traffic, including transport overhead and whatever buffering or prefetching Apple is doing.

Apple doesn’t appear to publish the codec and bitrate used specifically for Apple Music Radio on macOS. Its documentation describes the available radio stations and the separate audio-quality settings for Apple Music tracks, but it doesn’t give a technical bitrate specification for Radio.

So the ~380–425 kbps you’re seeing may be perfectly normal, but it doesn’t establish that the radio audio itself is encoded at ~420 kbps. Some of that traffic can be buffering, metadata, protocol overhead, or other data used to keep the stream playing smoothly.

Without inspecting the actual media stream, I don’t think there’s a reliable way to derive the encoded audio bitrate from Activity Monitor alone.

A friendly note: This is the German-language Apple Support Community. Posting your question in German will make it easier for more members to understand it and offer assistance.

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