Apple has finally released Apple Digital Masters, a longstanding program from ‘Mastered for iTunes’.
While the high resolution recordings haven’t appeared in the Music app yet, Apple claims that most of the Apple Music top releases are ‘Digital Masters’. Approximately 71 percent of them in the Global Top 100 and 75 percent of them in the US Top 100 are under the program. Apparently, the Cupertino-based company has been working on it for years but this is the only time they’ve announced that the platform was going live.
Mastered for iTunes offers software tools and guidelines for music engineers, studios and artists to optimize their music for digital consumption via high-resolution masters encoding.
It’s been reported that Amazon is currently working on a similar program. Deezer and Tidal are two of the top streaming services that offer 16 and 24 bit lossless audio FLAC music for $20 a month.