Interesting read.
That paragraph is actually corrected at the end. Studios aren't submitting compressed songs to apple, but showing engineers what the encoding process is doing to the music in terms of clipping. Then they can master with that in mind, and submit this master to iTunes in an uncompressed lossless format. Apple actually does the encoding before posting them for sale. More on that later.If the implication there, that we haven't been treating our portable, compressed audio files with proper care, makes you think that Apple is finally moving toward a hi-def format, you'd be wrong. Instead, the company is asking bands and their labels to submit songs to the store that are encoded as AAC files directly from the original, 24-bit studio recordings.
Bob Ludwig claims lossy files done this way are better than lossless CD rips, a claim I am skeptical of.
The author of the article compared a lossy CD rip to a lossy Mastered for iTunes file and said the latter sounded noticeably better.For Bob Ludwig, a mastering engineer who remastered Coldplay's latest album, Mylo Xyloto, for the new "Mastered for iTunes" store, this makes sense. "From a technical viewpoint, there are cases where the lossy 24-bit AAC file would be superior to the lossless CD," Ludwig wrote in an email. "I did an early demonstration for some engineer friends of mine and the difference between the 'Mastered for iTunes' file I created and the one that was ripped from a 16-bit CD was easily heard on the little speakers on my MacBook Pro."
And it looks like there's some philosophical pushback, and naysayers who think engineers should be committed to putting out music in better quality formats, instead of trying to polish their turds (my editorial)I listened to the two versions of Coldplay's single, "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall," to test the difference. (I can't post audio samples of the two versions of the track here because the encoding process a file goes through in any audio editor obscures those subtle differences, but if you have a CD version of any of the albums in the "Mastered for iTunes" section of the store, you can compare easily by ripping the tracks at "iTunes Plus" quality.) Played over decent headphones, I could hear subtle differences, especially where the mix was denser and more complicated. Ludwig's "Mastered for iTunes" version sounds slightly less crowded, with clearer distinctions between similar tones in acoustic guitar and piano and sharper, less distorted drums.
About the correction up top:There's an implication there that bugs some people who believe iTunes, which is the single largest music retailer in the world, should do more to push the market toward higher-quality files, where those restrictions don't exist. John Vanderslice, a musician who owns Tiny Telephone, a recording studio in San Francisco where Death Cab For Cutie, Spoon, The Mountain Goats, Kronos Quartet and tUnE-yArDs have all recorded, thinks that asking the industry to make a commitment to highly compressed digital files is misguided.
Vanderslice's studio doesn't do mastering, but as a musician, producer and studio owner, he hears many albums before and after the mastering process. "The idea of mastering is that you have the definitive high resolution product and you wilfully ignore every other variable downstream," he says, "whether it's compression codecs or speakers or whether someone's listening to it on earbuds."
The idea of mastering for a lesser format, Vanderslice says, is "completely insane. My first reaction was it would be like if you were a writer and you were told that you would have to re-edit your book for the dimwitted or the dyslexic."
Why is this significant? Because the fact that Apple retains the lossless versions of the high-quality studio masters means that iTunes, at any time it decides to, can begin selling higher-quality encodes, or even lossless files.
