“Music as the Artist and Sound Engineer Intended” reads the tagline to the new feature Apple has just launched for the iTunes Store. Mastered For iTunes will offer music that was produced before the age of digital mastering in a format that stays true to its originally intended quality and format.
Apple goes on to explain that for many analog recorded records, the age of CD’s and digital mastering forced many record companies to compromise on the quality of the recordings in order to get them out to market as quickly as possible. Said differently, music that is recorded in digital does not always come out sounding as good as when it was recorded in analog. This resulted in the degradation of the quality of the music and this is what the new service aims to address.
“When the CD was first becoming a popular format, many older recordings were rushed to market. To make these recordings available as soon as possible, corners were sometimes cut. In several instances, the wrong master tapes were used or the CD was mastered poorly. Many of these mistakes have since been identified and corrected, but even so, a number of record labels are remastering older material for rerelease in high-resolution formats like DVD-A or SACD.”
In a white paper published to explain the new feature, Apple goes to great length to explain the major improvements in iTunes as well as significant changes in the way in which music is mastered today. According to Apple “Delicate and artful remastering can let works of genius be experienced as they were meant to be and haven’t been for years.”
The project will see music from the likes of Nirvana, Lana Del Rey and Beck showing up for sale in addition to other genres such as classical titles from, among others, Philip Glass. All the titles sell at $9.99 for an album and $1.29 for individual songs, similar to their non-mastered counterparts.
