Apple’s Mastered for iTunes Program: Features & Effects on Music Quality

Mastered for iTunes is a newly introduced program by Apple and folks are interested to know about its features and how it would be beneficial for Apple’s customers along with its effects sound quality of iTunes music. Let’s look into technical details of various audio formats and mastering in perspective of opinions delivered by many industrial professionals, as noted by Ars Technica today.

We enlisted Chicago Mastering Service engineers Jason Ward and Bob Weston to help us out, both of whom were somewhat skeptical that any knob tweaking could result in a better iTunes experience. We came away from the process learning that it absolutely is possible to improve the quality of compressed iTunes Plus tracks with a little bit of work, that Apple’s improved compression process does result in a better sound, and that 24/96 files aren’t a good format for consumers.

Ars has recently carried out  test projects with the help of many audio engineers for comparing multiple combinations of original 24-bit, 96 kHz master recordings, uncompressed WAV files ripped from CDs, standard iTunes Store tracks, and tracks created by applying Apple’s Mastered for iTunes progression to the master recordings.

As technology advances and bandwidth, storage, battery life, and processor power increase, keeping the highest quality masters available in our systems allows for full advantage of future improvements to your music. Also, though it may not be apparent because there may not always be a physical, tangible master created in LP or CD format, the iTunes catalog forms an important part of the world’s historical and cultural record. These masters matter—especially given the move into the cloud on post-PC devices.

According to their observations, as an example, when they played a In a standard iTunes Store track, it sounded “boxy” or “subdued” as compared to the original CD master WAV file, but when the same track was processed with Mastered for iTunes tools, the track amazingly played well with boosted and much better quality and sounded well “alive” on a subjective basis.

The most difficult point in analyzing the sound quality of a track concerns to the expressive response mixed up with how sounds feels to human ears. The analysts only can judge the quality of sound by applying various tools those quantitatively measure the waveforms generated by different audio files, but the decisive gauge of sound quality actually concerns to how human ears receive and intercept the sounds.

Even so, Apple tried their best by marketing its Mastered for iTunes program that encourages musicians and music professionals to have iTunes Store content highly matched with “music as the artist and sound engineer intended”, and due to its expediency musicians are adopting this program in massive for boosting up the quality of their music accessible through the world’s most trendy music seller.

To Get Yourself Updated with the Latest & Hottest Tech News, Join Us On Facebook or Follow Us On Twitter or Check Out Our Google+ Account …