iTunes Music: Mastering High Resolution Audio Delivery: Produce Great Sounding Music with Mastered for iTunes

Apple’s exciting new Mastered for iTunes (MFiT) initiative, introduced in early 2012, introduces new possibilities for delivering high-quality audio. For the first time, record labels and program producers are encouraged to deliver audio materials to iTunes in a high resolution format, which can produce better-sounding masters.

In iTunes Music, author and world-class mastering engineer Bob Katz starts out with the basics, surveys the recent past, and brings you quickly up to the present―where the current state of digital audio is bleak. Katz explains the evolution of standards for dynamic range through the present and with implications for the future. He details the new methods that Apple is developing to accept high resolution audio and shows step by step how audio engineers and producers can take advantage of them.

This book is designed for all those dealing with sound, from sound engineers to music industry executives and musicians―and those aspiring to all these roles. This book will help you understand the issues around delivering high-quality environment and get all your facts straight for when you encounter resistance to good sound.

Topics covered include:

• Contrasting the production of CD albums with iTunes albums
• High Resolution audio
• Dithering
• Distortion (and how to avoid it)
• Lossy Coding
• Loudness Metering
• Sound Check and how it affects our production techniques
• Apple’s tools for Mastered for iTunes

Foreword by renowned mastering engineer Bob Ludwig.

Join the forums at www.digido.com/iTunes, for the latest information and discussions!

Bob Katz played the B flat clarinet from the age of 10, and his lifelong love of sound and music led him to become a professional recording, mixing and mastering engineer (since 1971). Three of his recordings have garnered the GrammyT award and many others have been lauded in publications such as Stereo Review, Audio, and Stereophile. He has written over one hundred articles for audio and computer publications, and is an inventor and manufacturer with processors and support gear in use at mastering studios worldwide. His most recent patent-pending inventions, the K-Stereo and K-Surround Processors, fill a missing link in the mastering and post- production pantheon. He has been a workshops, facilities and section chairman of the AES and has given lectures in several countries. Currently, Bob runs Digital Domain Studios just north of Orlando, Florida.