New “Apple Digital Masters” label brings together high quality music on Apple Music

Perhaps many of you don’t remember, but in 2012, Apple launched a program called “Mastered for iTunes”, which was nothing more than a series of tools and incentives for record labels, producers and labels to make songs specially mastered available for the platform – that is, with the best possible quality to be reproduced in the Apple ecosystem.

Since then, a lot has changed, of course: the way we listen to music has changed, iTunes has died and streaming is the king of the charts. To keep up with the new times, Apple decided to kill “Mastered for iTunes” and replace it with a new label, called “Apple Digital Masters“.

The initiative brings several of the elements that characterized “Mastered for iTunes” in its years of existence, and consists mainly of a way to encourage creators and music producers to make their mastered content available in maximum quality on Apple platforms, which can be made with guidelines and special tools offered by the company. With that, the sound experience of files on Apple Music or the iTunes Store is as close as possible to master tape, which is the original recording.

It’s good to note that this doesn’t mean that Apple will start handling files lossless – Apple continues to adopt the format AAC, compressed, for music content on its platforms, but the tools made available by the company bring the content closer to the quality of a FLAC format, for example.

According to Apple, most of the artists and producers on its platform are already part of the program. The company claims that 75% of the songs in the Top 100 of the charts in the United States already have the “Apple Digital Masters” label, and the number drops slightly, to 71%, considering the global charts.

Apple Digital Masters stamp

Unfortunately, so far, it is impossible for us, consumers, to know if a particular song on Apple Music is within the standards of the “Apple Digital Masters”. On the other hand, if you are still in the habit of buying music through the iTunes Store, this is possible: just right-click on any track in your library and go to “Get Info”; the “Apple Digital Masters” label, if applicable, will be on the right.

via The Verge