Your iTunes library might get even more hi-fi soon, as CNN reports that Apple alongside other digital music retailers are in the process of trying to knock a few music publisher skulls together and upgrade the sound quality of digital music files.
When an album is recorded, it is generally done in a 24-bit audio format. Before being passed down to iTunes, though, this is downgraded to 16-bit files. Part of the reason is to accommodate legacy hardware, even though most modern Macs, and iTunes itself, can handle 24-bit sound. Your iPhone and iPod Touch, though, can’t.
If Apple succeeds in getting the music publishers to up the quality of the tracks available for sale through iTunes, you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the change at first unless you were on a modern Mac. Additionally, if Apple did not improve the hardware in their iPod line-up, you’d still be consigned to listening to 16-bit songs, presumably through an on-the-fly downgrading process when syncing.
This wouldn’t be the first time Apple has drastically upgraded the quality of its iTunes library. It did the same thing back in January of 2009, doubling the bit-rate and also offering DRM-free tracks for the first time.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
13 responses to “Apple Is Working To Upgrade Sound Quality of All iTunes Tracks”
Sounds good. But how do they try to achieve this. Does AAC support this? Is this a different FLAC standard?
Bumping to 24 bit but remaining at 256kbps sample rates is completely pointless. Forget 24 bit audio, the biggest improvement will be to leave it at 44.1k 16-bit and give us the Apple Lossless Codec for the songs instead, this will allow everything on iTunes to have a sonic improvement, 24 bit would require endless remastering of final mixes to provide any benefit. ALL music mastered for CD (which is where the vast amount of music on iTunes comes from) is mastered to 16 bit. Upsampling to 24 bit from there is a waste of time as the extra “bits” arent there in the first place.
I don’t think that’s the point. They want to bring the songs from pre-CD mastering (or whatever that work step is called) directly to a digital format.
I downloaded an app called Headquake from the app store, makes my itunes sound great.Â