A Look at Apple's 'Mastered for iTunes' Program and its Effect on Sound Quality

[Johbremat]

The CD has been the gold standard for audio since 1982. It's been the best format that is widely commercially available...

You misspelled "DAT".

In 30 years, Apple hasn't only refused to improve the quality of media, they actually made it substantially worse. That is actually laughable. What's next? Will Apple start selling Betamax tapes through a catalogue?

One can only hope. Was a far better technology that VHS.

Don't forget the warping. It's always fun to pay $40 for a reissue, open it, and discover it's warped beyond all recognition and virtually unplayable.

Quality control on new vinyl is horrendous.

Then you must be doing it wrong. The only, rare-or-occasional issue I have with vinyl is the occasional bowled record. If QC on new vinyl was horrendous, unlikely the such a good chunk of the DJ community would still use vinyl (some of the biggest abusers, who couldn't ply their trade if their ax was warped).

 

[barkmonster]

CD is 44.1Khz, 16bit
Bluray is 96Khz, 24bit
DVD is 48Khz, 24bit

unless the medium is video, dithering down from 24 (or 32bit float) to 16 bit and using a sample rate of 88.2Khz or 44.1Khz instead of 96Khz would likely yield the best quality after conversion to a 44.1Khz 256Kbps AAC file.

You're doing some horrible bit squashing and fractional sample rate conversion otherwise and that must impact sound quality. Even though my abacus of a G4 can't handle it and I can never finish anything as a result, I still work in 24 bit, 44.1Khz in Pro Tools LE and dither down to 16 bit before converting to a 256Kbps AAC file. I can't see it being any different in a professional mastering situation.

 

[drumcat]

1) iTunes didn't put anyone out of business. You are absolutely dreaming in technicolor if you think itunes had anything to do with the death of the CD. Piracy killed the CD, not itunes. 100% free music killed the local CD store, not Apple or Steve Jobs. If people could download Macbooks for free, Apple would die an agonizing death too. I guess you could argue that the ipod had a hand in the death of retail music, but itunes certainly didn't.

2) The CD has been the gold standard for audio since 1982. It's been the best format that is widely commercially available, so people who buy that format are not suckers. Think about it, people (suckers) are actually paying MORE in some cases for digitally compressed garbage sold on itunes vs. the lossless 16/44 version found on CD. It's baffling.

3) Think about how sad it is that Apple is selling media that has been outclassed since 1982 (30 years, for those who have trouble with math). In 30 years, Apple hasn't only refused to improve the quality of media, they actually made it substantially worse. That is actually laughable. What's next? Will Apple start selling Betamax tapes through a catalogue?

It's funny that you joke about Apple selling Betamax tapes. Betamax is exactly what you're asking for in a VHS world.

If you don't think online audio distribution played a role in the demise of the CD store, please... puff, puff, pass. Not 100%, but a significant role. Add piracy, and the ability to buy a 99¢ single instead of a $20 album with a single and filler. The bubble burst. But without the iTunes-studio deals, you're still going to Warehouse Records, or ordering the disc from Amazon.

Is it baffling that customers choose convenience over quality? Most people are ok with their camera-phones, not DSLR 100%. They shoot in jpg, not raw. People chose VHS, despite the bigger tapes and lower quality. People still by a wide margin find DVD acceptable, despite most having TVs capable of more. And here are some things that never hit mass-adoption:

• SACD
• DVD-Audio
• 96k/24b
• Mini-disc (it was crap, especially ATRAC3)
• HD Radio

What has been adopted since 1982?

• MP3
• Satellite Radio
• Spotify / streaming services
• Nickelback & Creed

So since 1982, the "gold standard" had 52nd Street by Billy Joel come out (yes, debatable but that's the story) and since then, major adoption quality has gone DOWN. For you and me who enjoy good audio, that's not great, but it points to a market where the "gold standard" literally is the highest quality you need. I've dealt with audio with sample rates in the millions (ask a dolphin researcher about audio quality) and I've dealt with testing codecs that are awful. Try encoding at 56k mono mp3; Fraunhofer's last codec has a bug.

So when you say "outclassed", you're absolutely correct. There are audio products capable of discerning the different buzz of a mosquito wing. Does that mean it's appropriate for the masses? Clearly not. You're asking for Apple to start providing tracks of Justin Bieber at 96/24. Really?

Let me reframe the Pepsi Challenge... do you think that you could A/B the current Pop top 40 between 256 AAC and 96/24, and do it on Beats Audio headphones and an iPhone?

 

[knucklehead]

I'm a music geek too.

But I won't fall into the whole "Lossless" debate, and go straight to the point: In 2012 am I the ****ing only remaining one who see the huge marketing BS this "Mastered for iTunes" proprietary shvt is ?

Not that Apple is one to shy away from marketing BS, but "Mastered for iTunes" actually does work to make AAC sound it's best. Since 256AAC is what Apple sells -- and is more than good enough for the vast majority of listeners --
it's not just pure BS.

 

[philipma1957]

Let me reframe the Pepsi Challenge... do you think that you could A/B the current Pop top 40 between 256 AAC and 96/24, and do it on Beats Audio headphones and an iPhone?

No and most can't tell the difference if they hear it in a car stereo due to all the street noise. but if you have a really good sound system mp3 is pretty much a joke at all but the highest coding.

128 sounds empty compared to apple lossless on any good sound system

 

[blow45]

amen. fanned.

Thanks, king of darkness!

 

[iBug2]

Diminishing returns?

Let me clarify: I am all for choice, but you cannot honestly posit that Apple would be gaining hordes of customers if they allowed downloads in lossless, esp. considering the small storage capacity of Apple products these days.

Computers have small storage capacities? They do offer 1080p in addition to 720p don't they? Surely they can do the same with music.

 

[Owen Imholte]

Best to use ABX software to do the test. Unfortunately, good ABX software for OS X is hard to come by. Perhaps there's some better now, but the best I found a couple of years ago was foobar2000 with the ABX plugin. Essential to have the volume level of the samples exactly the same.

Edit-

Sorry Owen. Didn't mean to diss you there.
I haven't tried your software yet. Just glancing at your suggested features list made it look to be in a pretty early stage.
Are you planning on continuing development?

Ha, no worries! Yeah, it is very 1 point 0 ish right now. I do have some other ideas (help explain the flow to avoid bias inside the app in a better way, better logging, cleaner interface) and I'd like to get it in the Mac App Store someday but currently app development is a side gig and iOS items are higher on the priority list. (Hopefully a minor rev can be made before the Mountain Lion release.)

 

[Owen Imholte]

One problem with A/B testing this way. Many times the lossy MP3 files will be quite close except for a few short duration transient effects. The kind of things MP3 has trouble encoding are electronic drum hits and some synth sounds.

The better way to compare is just to listen to the MP3. You may have to listen to a few songs before you hear an "artifact" but when you do hear one you don't need special software it will be just plain obvious.

Interesting. I often think about the artifacts like their counterpart on a JPEG, which are detected similarly to how you describe catching audio artifacts. So after listening to a handful of songs and finding a glitch would it be valuable to load that segment into an ABX in order to prove to yourself it is discernible?

 

[overcast]

i mean its so easy to get content online. rather than paying for it.



i do support artists i like. but damn sure i cannot afford all the content i want to hear. its just ridiculous. but then again i buy physical albums as a collector rather than buying a digital album.



movies yea, cuz downloading movies and than converting them is a bitch, and more of a danger.

i just don't think i can ever go to iTunes and actually pay for everyone of my tracks.

Uh, ok? What does that have to do with using iTunes to organize your media?

 

[JAT]

Some things really need to be said on this thread...


But if you must fight, understand this is about other people than you. If you all want to whip out your johnson and measure, go do it with the understanding that you're just trolling. Yay for you, o hearer of minutia...great sultan of the DAC. Just don't act like it's your natural right to get lossless audio. It's not. The market doesn't sell to you. The market sells to where the money is, and for every one of you who thinks that AAC is some abomination, there's 499 people who think that FM radio is good enough.

Wow. Just....wow.

I apologize for existing. I will shoot myself now. Or would you like to do it? Your opinion of some people is lower than my opinion of the mp3 codec. No doubt, you have the ****ing moral high ground.

 

[barkmonster]

No and most can't tell the difference if they hear it in a car stereo due to all the street noise. but if you have a really good sound system mp3 is pretty much a joke at all but the highest coding.

128 sounds empty compared to apple lossless on any good sound system

It only takes a decent set of headphone with at least some degree of noise cancellation, even if it's simply the cushioned design of the earpads and little to no background noise to notice the distinct warble or general muddyness of 128K tracks. I shudder to think how bad it must sound in actual studio conditions.

 

[canman4PM]

This is why I still buy CD's and occasionally LP's. I long for the day when storgage is large enough that I can digitize my entire music collection in a lossless format and still stuff it all onto a single iPod/iPhone-type device.

And while we're at it, storage for all my movies with all of them stuffed onto an iPad-type device.

Hell, I'd settle for the media compressed for my portable players, but I want total lossless for my home systems.

 

[AidenShaw]

This is why I still buy CD's and occasionally LP's. I long for the day when storgage is large enough that I can digitize my entire music collection in a lossless format and still stuff it all onto a single iPod/iPhone-type device.

And while we're at it, storage for all my movies with all of them stuffed onto an iPad-type device.

Hell, I'd settle for the media compressed for my portable players, but I want total lossless for my home systems.

Thanks for the reminder - I've been meaning to copy my 450 GiB of lossless CD rips to a USB drive for the office.

The 2.4 TiB of movies though, stay at home. Not sure if one can call them "lossless" - they're ISO rips of the DVDs and BDs, but the source is compressed. I'm not losing anything, but the source isn't lossless.

 

[AppleScruff1]

FLAC is the universal lossless format. Naturally Apple wouldn't use it.

 

[ChrisA]

^^^
...e is absolutely no way to falter in de-compression and have a lossless file sound any different than AIFF or WAV? Aside from glitch or obvious errors.
The only difference is the CPU usage? Lossless being a bit harder due to the expansion as playing?
I must have amazing placebo powers.

"losslless" really is lossless. It is bit for bit identical to the CD. As for CPU usage it might even be less because the file size is about 1/2 the size of the same WAV file. So less data moves and maybe less total CPU usage.

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This is why I still buy CD's and occasionally LP's. I long for the day when storgage is large enough that I can digitize my entire music collection in a lossless format and still stuff it all onto a single iPod/iPhone-type device.

And while we're at it, storage for all my movies with all of them stuffed onto an iPad-type device.

Hell, I'd settle for the media compressed for my portable players, but I want total lossless for my home systems.

Disk space is already cheap. Lets say a 1TB disk sells for $100. One CD compress to FLAC or Apple Lossles is abut 500MB. This means a $100 disk can hold 2,000 CDs. I think it works out to 5 cents per CD. But you need triple redundant backups so call it 20 cents per CD.

 

[BubbaMc]

Market confusion. Most people don't know what it is.

5 minutes after it's offered on the itunes store people would start educating themselves. If it's available, people will try it. If it's not available, they won't.

 

[Truffy]

I have the same question. I bought into the iTunes ecosystem only when the iPod started supporting ALAC playback and I expected ALAC content on iTunes to be just around the corner.

Here we are in 2012 and I've never purchased a song from iTunes. If they started selling them in ALAC, I would buy hundreds.

Me too. In fact, I've gone back to buying and ripping CD, sometimes of stuff I've already bought on iTMS.

 

[curtisinoc]

I think there's a lot of confusion with people thinking that a high bitrate equals great sound. As some have correctly pointed out, "mastering" is completely different than bitrate!!!!

A well mastered cd/audio track ripped into iTunes at 128kbps will "sound" waaaaaaaay better to your ears than a crappy mastered cd/audio track that is "lossless".

 

[derbothaus]

FLAC is the universal lossless format. Naturally Apple wouldn't use it.

That is why there is this.
http://code.google.com/p/flukeformac/

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"losslless" really is lossless. It is bit for bit identical to the CD. As for CPU usage it might even be less because the file size is about 1/2 the size of the same WAV file. So less data moves and maybe less total CPU usage.

If it is bit for bit it would be the same size. Less data is "stored" because of compression. At playback the bits and size are identical. Playback expands the bits and is harder on a CPU (impossible otherwise) and why you don't want to say edit a H264 file over a .mov. The compression garners overhead. At least as others have explained.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

It only takes a decent set of headphone with at least some degree of noise cancellation, even if it's simply the cushioned design of the earpads and little to no background noise to notice the distinct warble or general muddyness of 128K tracks. I shudder to think how bad it must sound in actual studio conditions.

While I agree 128kbps has audible problems (much worse in MP3 than AAC, though), your typical (not all, though) studio probably has worse speakers than the average American.... Well, maybe not since that's probably pretty darn low too. The point is that they purposely use less than ideal speakers because most mix for the lowest common denominator.

I don't agree with that method. What sounds good on a high-end rig should sound decent on a low-end one. My best sounding albums still sound find in stock car stereos, etc., but the opposite is NOT true. Many albums that sound OK on cheap systems, often sound HORRIBLE on high-end systems.

Having said that, my own testing with 256kbps AAC cannot show an audible difference from the CD or even my own 24/96 masters (good for headroom while recording, though). Similarly, 320kbps MP3 sounds transparent to me as well. I used to talk to one of the engineers behind AAC and they went to Hell and back to make sure it was transparent as possible at low levels, let alone the higher ones which always DBX transparent.

This is why AAC-HE is at least listenable whereas similar rates for MP3, etc. are beyond horrors to listen to. On the video front, notice how H264 goes 'soft' as encoding gets tight instead of "blocky". It's far less objectionable to the eye and such is how AAC is to the ear compared to those god-awful cymbals and 'flange-like' sounds MP3s break down into as the bit-rate drops.

FLAC is the universal lossless format. Naturally Apple wouldn't use it.

As defined by whom? You? What makes it universal? Is Linux universal? Open source doesn't make something the de-facto standard, you know. Personally, I couldn't care less about format wars. Apple Lossless is just as lossless in nature as FLAC and in fact, it's very simple with utilities to convert between the two formats with NO LOSS what-so-ever. I use ALAC where appropriate (for my DTS CDs, for example) precisely because it is supported in iTunes and I need to work on my Apple-based whole house audio/video system. And having video (including photo slideshows) options in every room in the house trumps something like Squeezebox or Sonos any day of the week, IMO. I've got the option for audio only rooms or audio/video rooms and I'm up to 6 rooms at this point (4 audio/video, 2 audio only). Yeah, it would be nice if iTunes supported 3rd party formats as plugins or something, but I've got to choose functionality over mind games. ALAC is no longer closed, so it's moot.

 

[AppleScruff1]

While I agree 128kbps has audible problems (much worse in MP3 than AAC, though), your typical (not all, though) studio probably has worse speakers than the average American.... Well, maybe not since that's probably pretty darn low too. The point is that they purposely use less than ideal speakers because most mix for the lowest common denominator.

I don't agree with that method. What sounds good on a high-end rig should sound decent on a low-end one. My best sounding albums still sound find in stock car stereos, etc., but the opposite is NOT true. Many albums that sound OK on cheap systems, often sound HORRIBLE on high-end systems.

Having said that, my own testing with 256kbps AAC cannot show an audible difference from the CD or even my own 24/96 masters (good for headroom while recording, though). Similarly, 320kbps MP3 sounds transparent to me as well. I used to talk to one of the engineers behind AAC and they went to Hell and back to make sure it was transparent as possible at low levels, let alone the higher ones which always DBX transparent.

This is why AAC-HE is at least listenable whereas similar rates for MP3, etc. are beyond horrors to listen to. On the video front, notice how H264 goes 'soft' as encoding gets tight instead of "blocky". It's far less objectionable to the eye and such is how AAC is to the ear compared to those god-awful cymbals and 'flange-like' sounds MP3s break down into as the bit-rate drops.



As defined by whom? You? What makes it universal? Is Linux universal? Open source doesn't make something the de-facto standard, you know. Personally, I couldn't care less about format wars. Apple Lossless is just as lossless in nature as FLAC and in fact, it's very simple with utilities to convert between the two formats with NO LOSS what-so-ever. I use ALAC where appropriate (for my DTS CDs, for example) precisely because it is supported in iTunes and I need to work on my Apple-based whole house audio/video system. And having video (including photo slideshows) options in every room in the house trumps something like Squeezebox or Sonos any day of the week, IMO. I've got the option for audio only rooms or audio/video rooms and I'm up to 6 rooms at this point (4 audio/video, 2 audio only). Yeah, it would be nice if iTunes supported 3rd party formats as plugins or something, but I've got to choose functionality over mind games. ALAC is no longer closed, so it's moot.

No need to get defensive about it. I'll go out on a limb and guess that more audiophiles archive in FLAC than Apple lossless. There is life outside the orchard.

 

[stuckwithme247]

Apple Audio Mastering Tools

Is it worth it to use these tools to rip CDs instead of with iTunes, or is it far too complicated? Anyone try this and notice much of a difference?

 

[canman4PM]

Thanks for the reminder - I've been meaning to copy my 450 GiB of lossless CD rips to a USB drive for the office.

The 2.4 TiB of movies though, stay at home. Not sure if one can call them "lossless" - they're ISO rips of the DVDs and BDs, but the source is compressed. I'm not losing anything, but the source isn't lossless.

I have around 1100 hours of music in my computer. Compressed, that's around 65GB. I have ripped some DVD's for use on my iPhone while travelling, so they're re-compressed compressions and I have a few Digital Copies and together they take up a couple dozen gigs. But my movie collection topped 500, last time I counted - in various formats. I don't even want to think about what kind of space that'd take up. Even re-compressed down to an iPhone standard that's gotta be half a TB.

You're right, of course, movies are all compressed anyways, save the Bluray soundtracks. <sigh> Shouldn't complain, I guess. I grew up in the Walkman generation; tapes. I used to travel with 10-20 albums at a time and thought that was pretty cool. The selection of which I would agonize over for hours, like a woman [some, not all - no hatemail ladies] trying to decide what clothes to take. Now the whole collection comes with me on an old HD iPod everywhere I go.

 

[AidenShaw]

I have around 1100 hours of music in my computer. Compressed, that's around 65GB.

My 450 GiB is 1249 hours.

Almost all of your music must be 128Kbps to fit 1100 hours in 65GB....