Do you consider yourself to be an audiophile who needs to hear just about every note and every instrument being played in a song? Or are you a listener who don’t mind the music coming from laptop speakers or $10 headphones? Well whichever the case, the good news is that if you find yourself shopping for your music on iTunes frequently, you will be pleased to hear that Apple has recently launched a new section in the iTunes Store called “Mastered for iTunes”.
What does this mean? Well based on reports, it seems that after songs are being mastered in the studio and are run through the AAC algorithm, it has been approximated that about 80-85% of the information present at the time of recording is lost during the process of encoding to AAC format. While the average user may not be able to tell the difference, there were enough complaints for Apple to sit up and take notice.
This has resulted in the Mastered for iTunes section in the iTunes Store, which not only will highlight albums that have been specially mixed for iTunes, but will also provide studios with the tools and help they need to provide better sounding mixes of their records. So even if you do not consider yourself to be an audiophile, the better quality recordings are still to your benefit. If you’ve tried any of the songs from the Mastered for iTunes section, we’d love to hear from you what you think of it, and if the improvements made are noticeable.
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