I knew this already of course, but the full magnitude of her mad, crazy genius-ness didn’t really hit me until last night, watching the live Facebook webcast of her new song – “Me The Machine” (aka #heapsong6).
And it made quite difficult watching, if I’m honest.
Because this was Immi as we hadn’t seen her before – un-prepared, un-happy and perhaps even a little out of control. As the fascinating, scary “making-of” movie that opened the webcast vividly described, this was a project with “thousands” of things that could go wrong – and they all depended at the last moment on Imogen’s slightest gesture.
And things did go wrong – as Imogen herself admitted afterwards. And it was obvious that she was unhappy about it. The performance didn’t go as she wanted it to – but how could it be ? She wanted it to be perfect.
Well, it wasn’t perfect – but it was stunning, spine-tingling, and extraordinary, all the same.
So as the dust starts to settle on this year’s Dynamic Range Day, I have a moment to revisit “Mastered for iTunes” – hopefully for the last time !
Why do I need to ? Because since my recent posts about this subject, I’ve been criticised for them. Some of it’s justified, but much of it isn’t, and I wanted to answer some of the comments.
And to get the ball rolling, in collaboration with TurnMeUp.org, we’ve published an open letter to the music industry calling for and end to the Loudness War.
To read the letter and find out what the infographic above is all about, click here.
Apple’s new “Mastered for iTunes” has been causing quite a buzz recently – and causing lots of confusion.
I’m going to try and explain it all as clearly as I can.
[Update edit: I started out sceptical, but after new clues have been discovered about Apple's plans for "Mastered for iTunes", I'm actually very excited by the opportunity it presents - check out the "Stop Press" update at the end of this post.]
There are four five ways that the term “Mastered for iTunes” can be interpreted.
1. Mastered for iTunes is a set of utilities and guidelines
The easiest to understand and least controversial definition of “Mastered for iTunes” is described on this page on Apple’s site, here:
Basically it’s a set of guidelines for people to follow, to ensure you get the best quality versions of you music files available in the iTunes Music Store. Apple also include free utilities that allow you to preview how your files will sound once they’re encoded.
The guidelines are great – they encourage you to submit the highest quality files, and suggest how avoid falling into common traps that affect the quality – for example avoiding clipping and not over-cooking the music’s level because of the so-called “Loudness Wars“.
At the moment, the final files are still 44.1 KHz, 256 Kbps AAC files – so, they’re perceptually encoded files, using lossy compression – basically like high-class mp3s.
Whether you’ll hear a real difference from submitting a 24/96 version of your music is debatable – my quick tests suggest the answer is “not much” – but Apple also hint that in future they will use the high-quality masters to offer better downloadable versions in future, which can only be a good thing.
[Edit: Some people are getting confused about exactly what "Mastered with iTunes" means, and what it is - for all the details, click here.]
So, the “Mastered for iTunes” concept has been getting a lot of press in the last couple of days, and there’s a claim that’s being made that bugs me.
Specifically, it’s being said that the “Mastered for iTunes” versions ‘sound closer to the CD’.
Not true.
Test-ably not true.
Don’t believe me ? Watch the video. It proves this claim is untrue, by using a technique know as ‘null testing’ to highlight the sonic differences.
As I say in the video, people may well prefer the “Mastered for iTunes” versions, and there’s absolutely no reason not to make a specific master for a particular release format – but to say that it sounds ‘closer to the CD’ is just wrong.
Let me know what you think in the comments !
Update
Just to be clear, it’s the specific mastering processing that’s supposed to be “optimised for mastering” that I’m calling out here – the sonic choices made by the mastering engineer.
Apple have release an excellent set of guidelines on Mastering for iTunes, and I’m delighted to see a clear discussion of issues like the loudness wars, sample rate conversion, dither and clipping.
BUT the fact that the new Apple encoders can correctly handle high sample rates, and should make a better job on the conversion, STILL doesn’t mean that the files will sound ‘closer to CD’.
In fact, since at the end of the day we’re still getting a lossy encode, it’s my opinion that the advantages of higher bit-depths and sample rates will be completely outweighed by the AAC encoding.
If Apple really care about giving us high-quality audio, they should offer lossless formats… but that’s a whole other blog post !
Update 2
A few people have asked me where the claim that “Mastered for iTunes” masters sound “closer to the CD” comes from.
To be clear, this isn’t something that Apple themselves have said, to my knowledge.
The phrase originally came from Scott Hull’s comment on the first post I wrote about Mastering for iTunes, discussing the RHCP release:
“The goal of the unique AAC master of the Chili Peppers album was to make it sound as close to the CD as possible. The ears involved in the process felt it was a success. Pick up the CD and compare to the AAC file with your ears. It’s really damn close. Keep in mind, I’m not addressing whether or not you like the sound of the CD. It was RR’s goal to make the Itunes file as true to the sound of the CD as possible despite the data reduction. A lot of time, effort and careful listening went into this project. This was not just media hype.”
And, here’s Rick Rubin saying that AAC encoding needs to be compensated for:
“The problem? The AAC compression algorithm is “quite quirky.” Without compressing a song, and carefully listening to it, then comparing to the uncompressed master, there’s no way to predict how the sound will change. Vlado Meller, another engineer at Masterdisk, described mastering for iTunes “like polishing your Bentley in total darkness, then turning on the lights to see where you missed.”
“There are no accurate real-time tools to help you hear what the algorithm will do,” VanDette said. “It was not uncommon to revise tracks three, four, even five times until I got something that compared well with the CD.”
Slightly different words, but the same spin. And still not true.
"I knew what Ian was going to say before he'd even finished saying it - and I couldn't believe it hadn't occurred to me before. That's what his advice gave me: perspective. Exactly when I need it."
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