En närmare titt på "Mastered for iTunes"

Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.

There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.

Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig (Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana, Soundgarden) told me that Apple spent 18 months investigating how to make the AAC encoder better. The results, he says, are “a great thing.”

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Some people think that mastering for a digital format is silly, but it’s downright stupid to ignore iTunes. Apple is the largest distributor of music and if you don’t think that improving the quality of your music for millions of people, then you don’t really care about your fans.

As a musician and a music lover, I’m in favor of any process that captures more dynamic range of the music I’m going to buy. It’s a good thing for everyone involved, but most especially for the consumers that purchase and listen to the music.

Apple even documents the trend towards louder mastered music, commonly referred to as “the loudness wars” and offers tips and advice. With music being so loud these days, running a song through any encoder will often cause clipping — it’s the nature of encoders. However, one of the tools Apple provides to engineers allows them to check the AAC files for clipping and then make adjustments before the songs are sent to iTunes.