The AES meetings gives out very interesting information and this time was no exception.
Now the online sales of music has surpassed CD, mastering for online distribution has become more important. I did not completely realize this until yesterday.
Before Yesterday
I though that I can create good sounding CD tracks, give it to CD Baby and I would be all set. At least I know that data is lossy compressed by them or iTunes. That's their business.
After Yesterday
CD is now becoming obsoleted in many respects. First the sampling rate of 44.1 KHz is no longer the norm. 96 KHz or even 192 KHz are now standard. Also the sample size of 16-bit/channel is no longer the norm on the mastering side of the equation, it is now 24-bit or 32-bit float format using the AAC encoder that can go into the masters.
Data to the end-users will continue to be lossy compressed but as more bandwidth become available and more storage space is available at lower cost, higher resolution materials will become more available. It also appears from as much as I can gather so far, that the end result will still be 44 KHz down-sampled data is what will be supplied to the consumer today as existing mobile devices and such need to be supported but that's about to change in the next few years.
In fact they talked about Neil Young's new venture PONO which promised to distribute contents at higher resolution than Apple does today. We will have to see when that comes out.
With these types of changes, the big labels are asking for masters to be provided in more modern forms (and not just a CD), so that your content can be certifiable by the Apple standard, especially most important is clipping.
The good news for us, independents, is the tools are open to us as well, and also CD Baby will rep your masters made in this new way. To this effect Apple is also providing information and tools.
As usual there are usual caveats associated with this. From what I understood, if you want to go this route, then your 24-bit master cannot be released on other services outside of iTunes. So you'd need to re-master the output in the standard CD rate... may be to sell at other sources. Another one is that if you make an EP and even a single track out of that does not meet the Apple standard then any future re-assemblies will not qualify for "Mastered for iTunes."
There is quite a bit more to be learned from this on my part, but you can get started from the links below and there are tons of info and discussions by simply Googling for "Mastered for iTunes."
- Apple's Mastered for iTunes Page
- Digital Domain's Info on This (who sponsored the talk at AES)
- Bobby Owsinski Video Class of Mastered for iTunes on Lynda.COM (Free!)
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