Apple renames ‘Mastered for iTunes’ calling it ‘Apple Digital Masters’ and grouping all tracks that have been encoded in one place. Mastered for iTunes was launched in 2012 and is a set of tools and guidelines that encouraged record producers to use studio quality 24-bit 96 kHz originals to produce the 256 kbps AAC files that iTunes streams.
Despite many press reports Apple Digital Masters are not HiRes and there are no publicly announced plans for Apple Music to offer a lossless streaming service. With the demise of iTunes in the upcoming new version of iOS to be released in the autumn it makes sense to rebrand these ‘higher quality’ tracks.
Apple says that most of the top releases on Apple Music are actually encoded as Digital Masters with around 75% of the Top 100 in the US and 71% of the Top 100 globally produced to this standard.
To read Apple’s technical briefing notes for artists and engineers, Mastered for iTunes: Music as the Artist and Sound Engineer intended, you can download the 10 page PDF document here.
