Mastered For iTunes

Seems that only you started to take it “personally”…

Easy on this…until you can show any information that actually quantifies interest…I highly doubt there is any “demand” from a typical 16 year old kid who uses iTunes saying “I wish I had the MFit version of this song”.

People that buy anything from the Apple store simply do not (and cannot) be associated with audio quality. It’s simply not possible.

From all that I could gather on this thing - this entire “toolkit” is nothing more than a file converter (at best) and as such - should not require any “special care”. It’s not like you are in control and “creating” anything with it. Any mastering engineer (or me for that matter) simply runs his or her tracks through it to create an aac file. Where’s the skill in that?

I am truly hoping that PG will not suddenly decide to taking WL in any direction that panders to any inferior “lossy” file creation or any kind of “Apple” specific egosystem in particular - I (and many others) will be very disappointed.

VP

Well, I have read it, and must say that I–as much as I admire Bob for his knowledge and contributions to the audio community (and my copy of MA is a couple of reads away from being in pieces) as well as being a really nice guy–also am quite disappointed in this last effort. There’s a bunch of useful info in there, but (apart from being shoddily written and looking like it was designed by a rank amateur), its basic premise is in effect flawed. Statements such as “Apple has always been concerned about [audio] quality” are ludicrous (given the fact that they have been pushing 128k mp3s for years), and promoting a lossy format as a step forward is plain silly in 2013, when Flac and Apple Lossless are the obvious HQ contenders.

r,
j,

+1.

VP

sure… you are all right of course… what was I thinking… :open_mouth:
OK,… back on topic again guys!

OK - on topic. I am not interested in paying extra for any addon I would never use.

Nor would I ever need any WL gadget to tell me that my master is “clipping”. While there are dozens of ways to ensure your master is not clipping - the easiest one is called “headroom”.

Common sense dictates that every mix should have some. Don’t need a plugin for this.

VP

Just read that over 65% of music sold in the US is via iTunes. None of us have to like that fact … but it is real. The format is not ideal … but then neither is what is delivered from any other digital source be it by download, by subscription, by satellite or by terrestrial broadcast. Combined I suspect those mediums account for 80% of what is listened to these days! I live in a college town and there is NO venue to buy music on physical media within 20 miles.

Seems to me that any musician producing content for any type of consumption would want their product to sound as good as it could possibly be on any delivery platform. Therefore it is a requirement that a tool designed for the sole purpose of making this happen should be able to assess, manipulate and deliver whatever content the market requires … and it would be good if it was ahead of the curve, not behind.

Personally I love my few SACD’s … I have a few DVD-A disks which aren’t too shabby either. But hey, Spotify is a dream come true as far as discovery and pure musical enjoyment are concerned. When I’m on a plane, my iPhone cant be beat … its the world we live in and WL as a Professional tool should be able to handle those compressed formats to the highest standard possible.

Just my 2cents

Oh, my bad! No mention of Apple in the title “iTunes Music”, nor in the term MFiT. :laughing:

Yeah that would be you. Oh, and I thought you were done arguing… :nerd:

+1

That is why in the first(!) post I already talked about a WL8 pro version for professionals among us that need these kind of tools like most mastering-engineers. Just like a there is an elements version for people that don’t need all the extra stuff in the full version. And I know for sure that there are dozens of functions in WL7 that you payed for but you do not use while others maybe do, so what is the problem?
That you guys don’t need it or believe in it doesn’t mean that this is the same for the rest as well. The rest of the people answering including PG is positive about it, maybe start thinking about that. That is what this topic was about in the first place and it was never meant to turn in a pro / con battle if MFiT is bullshit or not…

Where are those dozens of ways to ensure your master will not clip after conversion and how much headroom are you talking about? THAT is what i’m trying to explain all the time… There are no tools that can do that besides the apple tools and pro-codec. If there are, give me some links to pluginns/software/ whatever and prove me wrong.

Thank you :wink:

Do I really have to explain it to you? You were giving me the impression that you were a pro mastering engineer…

How about starting with your eyes (WL metering) and ears (your monitors) instead of looking for crutches like plugins? Or start by placing a limiter in line to ensure your master NEVER exceeds -1dbFS.

If your master does not exceeds -1.0 dbFS - I am at a loss as to how it could ever clip when converting to AAC.

Again - this is basic stuff - all available in WL right now…

VP

Actually, PG said this: “Being able to Master audio files while monitoring the effect it would have in mp3 format (among others) would be a welcome addition to WaveLab.” Not exactly strong support for the Apple-only MFiT. I don’t care what others want to do in Wavelab, but the full version is already Wavelab Pro, and anyone who wants to extend the capabilities is free to use his own choice of extensions in the form of plugins.

I prefer not to pay for specific proprietary codecs in my software, like others may not need plugins that I use regularly. So go ahead, buy any MFiT plugin you want (or get the free Apple AU Lab) and be happy you can deliver substandard compressed audio.

da goose +1
Vocalpoint and Arjan P - 1

I don’t use Wavelabs internal compressor, Limiter, restoration plugins etc.
Please remove them and make me a cheaper version for me as I don’t want to pay for this as I don’t use it.
Thanks.

sorry guys, but I stop it here now for real. You both want to make your point, fine… go ahead… Stick to what you think is right, i’ll do the same, among a lot of others.

“Being able to Master audio files while monitoring the effect it would have in mp3 format (among others) would be a welcome addition to WaveLab.”

Very true - I have noticed that depending on the source material, different MP3 encoders can sound markedly different to each other and this can be very pronounced when the levels are pushed close to 0db. I would say that some encoders need more margin from 0db than others, to avoid unacceptable distortion.

I am interested in establishing the right margin to feed different encoders with… and I have not found technical information on this easy to locate. So I do agree with PG here.

Bests
John

Well, I have to sort of agree with Johnny. Even though the idea behind MFiT downright silly and backwards (and Bob’s book is sub-par), having access to a built-in “listen how it will sound” tool could of course be beneficial. Not because of ISPs (just stop at -1dbFS and you’ll never hear or see them again) but to evaluate the damage being done by different bandwidths. (“Mastering for Internet radio” anyone?) I don’t imagine using it very much, I think we all have a pretty good idea of what happens when we’re codecifying the material, but just for a quick check when we get something different in the door. On the other hand, it really isn’t any more complicated than a render and listen, is it? Having it done in realtime ala ProCodec is of course handy, but not something you’d need every day. At least I wouldn’t. YMMofcourseW.

r,
j,

MFiT is imo a step forward, but ultimately the issue is business: if customers want it, that’s what I do. The simple way for WL to gain this capability is to add au support, but I realize that’s impractical (for windows users) and politically impossible (from vst’s originator), so I do think it’s useful to roll it into the application if possible.

As to the value and relative merits of a lossy format, I guess it depends on one’s perspective. Vinyl is a lossy but for some artists the most viable release format simply due to demand (some fans insist). Similarly iTunes is sometimes the only place a release might go for commercial reasons. If a particular audience is more likely to buy something somewhere, it’s not my job to second guess the people paying my salary (artist, label, and ultimately fans). But that’s me, ymmv.

MFiT actually does sound better than ripping a crushed CD or ingesting 44/16 post-transcoding for obvious reasons (more is more wrt resolution, less is less wrt distortion)… try it and compare (be sure to level-adjust, don’t be afraid to listen to null residues). Since you can always use Apple’s stuff in another AU app, mastering the files isn’t really the challenge; finding a digital distro to ingest it properly is the deal. Label projects find the right door, but indie stuff that goes through Tunecore defaults back to 44/16.

These days, a lot of the projects that we master are destined for digital release only.

In the ‘real world’, this means that iTunes will likely be the main shopfront for sales of the product.

Of course, iTunes Producer will not accept anything but stereo wave files (at least the last time I saw it this was the case). It follows that I have yet to have a request from either a label or client for an ‘AAC’ file as a deliverable.

But, it also means that it can be useful to listen to what the codec will do to the track whilst mastering it. Contrary to expectation, a good monitoring system quickly reveals that the codec can yield subtle, unexpected results and that merely adopting a ‘drop the level by 1dB’ approach will not necessarily result in the best sounding MFiT result (YMMV).

At present I use the Sonnox Pro Codec for this purpose. This is not ‘inexpensive’ if you are not mastering for a living like us. So, having the capacity to monitor from a ‘built in’ what a particular codec will do to a track can be useful.

Hello everybody
May be it s out of topic
Lately I have to do some mastering for music broadcast on soundcloud.
In oder to simulate the streaming degradation I used this plug decimator
http://www.tobybear.de/p_sourcebag.html
and after a few tweak I got a sound result really closed to the sound quality of soundcloud (if anybody knows better website for music streaming, I buy it)
But other issue showed up. Since most people listen to internet music on their smartphone, sometimes without headphone or with bad headphone, I think a CD standart mastering does not fit.
Why? Because on this kind of devices, the bass are almost invisible and the high mid are too accuented, therefore I think we need two differents kind of mastering, one for CD, one for music streaming.

Regards
Edouard

Good to hear this common sense approach here. Agree 100%.

Absolutely. It can be useful.

So with all of this said, which distros have people found who will accept Mastered for iTunes files (up to 96/24)? Tunecore doesn’t, discmakers didn’t last I looked. IODA did before, not sure now (our company stopped using them when they were bought out). Everyone I’ve delivered so far was for a big client who did their own digital distro with Apple.

What’s out there for bands and indies these days?