Apple Digital Masters

Table of Contents

What is Apple Digital Masters?

Cefe Flynn Mastering is a Certified Apple Digital Masters Provider, but what does this mean? 

Apple introduced Apple Digital Masters (known until August 2019 as Mastered for iTunes [MFiT]) in an effort to offer their customers the highest possible quality of audio through the iTunes music store and Apple Music.

To this end, Apple introduced a series of recommendations and workflow on how to specifically prepare and submit the masters for their distribution. To ensure their standards are met, Apple has created a set of  ‘Apple Digital Masters mastering tools’ that should be used by the mastering engineer to check that the masters meet Apple Digital Masters standards before submission.

To confirm that these recommendations are followed and to assure that the masters submitted maintain the highest fidelity right up to the point of their AAC encoding process, Apple has approved mastering engineers that went through and completed their evaluation process in order to be added to Apple’s official Apple Digital Masters Providers List.

Cefe Flynn Mastering has gone through this evaluation process and is on Apple’s Digital Masters Providers List.

How distribute Apple Digital Masters?

Most digital distributors/aggregators can accept Apple Digital Masters files, however they treat these files as a separate release and charge accordingly.

You will need to let your mastering engineer in advanced your intention to submit Apple Digital Masters so they can create a separate adaptive master that specifically meets Apple’s recommendations. 

You should receive from the engineer, only 24-bit files at the highest native sample rate available, eg:48k or 96k etc. 

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