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In Reply to: RE: Mastered for iTunes Critic Used Flawed Test to "Say BS" posted by Tony Lauck on March 14, 2012 at 20:40:31
I downloaded the Master for iTunes tools and procesed my test set of 24-96 WAV masters. In all cases, the afconvert program in the MfI toolkit produced an AAC file virtually identical to the one produced by standard iTunes. They were not exactly identical, but the audible difference amounted to occasional burps and murmurs. You have to conclude that the tools temselves are nothing new.
So it seems MfI is a concept, a carrot for the industry to create unique masters optimized for compression using existing tools, because there wasn't the incentive before. But, does certification a priori imply improvement?
Follow Ups:
There's a huge thread on the Gearslutz Mastering Forum. My conclusion is that this the Mastering for iTunes program is marketing hype. Compressing CD quality (or higher music) into 256 kbps AAC is like trying to put 5 or 10 pounds of music into a 2 pound bag. Using the best possible procedures may get you the full 2 pounds instead of 1 3/4 pounds.
If iTunes sold music encoded with ALAC at the same price then this issue simply wouldn't arise. Anyone who cared about sound quality could just download the ALAC version. If they wanted to store their entire library in a portable device they could use their computer to compress to lossy. It makes no sense to encode downloads in a lossy format today with bandwidth so cheap. The only possible reason for using lossy encoding today is for streaming applications over wireless networks (or to people who live in the third world when it comes to Internet connectivity).
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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