When you rip a song from a CD into iTunes as a "lossy" file like an MP3 (or AAC, Apple's preferred format), you're using a compression codec, a program designed to eliminate the parts of the sound in a song that you don't notice or can't hear. The music on standard commercial CDs is encoded at 16 bits.Įven so, the slightly compressed digital files on CDs are called "lossless" files because you can still take the quality down another step and have something most people enjoy listening to. The process of mastering a recording is taking the raw, mixed song and copying it to another format, with adjustments in the amount of information that can be transferred to the new medium and attendant tweaks to ensure it sounds as good as possible given the new format's limitations. Today, most studio tracks are recorded at 24 bits.
That's not just because musicians and recording engineers have better equipment than you do, but because the recordings themselves contain more information. The music you listen to, no matter what the format, sounds worse than it does in the studio where it was recorded. First, a few necessary words about mastering: The basic goal of the "Mastered for iTunes" store essentially cuts that ideal off at the knees, or at least points to the fact that we may have already been off that road for some time. For a decade, we were on a road to a musical utopia: great-sounding audio files that we could send from one place to another with ease. Among many, the hope, for the duration of the MP3 era, has been that quality would steadily improve in tandem with bandwidth and storage capabilities, so that eventually the quality of downloadable digital files would equal or surpass that of files burned onto little plastic discs. Users accepted that compromise because of the huge gains in convenience - no more carrying around booklets of CDs or waiting weeks for your local record store to restock a physical format.