Apple Digital Masters

Studio-quality sound. For everyone.

By working with the best possible masters, we are able to offer our Apple Music and iTunes customers the highest possible audio quality. Our latest encoder can take advantage of every bit of the high-resolution masters that engineers are creating especially for us. The results, for both streaming and download, are virtually indistinguishable from the original 24-bit studio masters. In addition, Apple Music now offers lossless versions of these masters using the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC).

Creating Apple Digital Masters

We are committed to delivering music as the artists and sound engineers intended it to be heard. We worked with many of the top mastering studios in the world to come up with workflows for creating the best possible masters for the Apple ecosystem — whether for streaming from Apple Music or downloading from the iTunes Store. You can read more on the background to those decisions as well as instructions on the use of the Apple mastering tools in this PDF.

Apple Digital Masters (PDF)

Mastering Tools

Download these tools to hear how music will sound after it’s encoded and to help make important creative choices during the mastering process. The Apple Digital Masters droplets are simple, standalone drag-and-drop tools that automate the creation and decoding of 256Kb/s AAC encodings using the Apple AAC encoder. AURoundTrip and afclip are now included in the latest version of macOS. For earlier versions of the OS, use the links below.

AU Lab

Apple’s free digital audio mixing application AU Lab can be used as a host application for Audio Unit effects, including the AURoundTripAAC plug-in, one of the Apple Digital Mastering tools. If you don’t already have Logic or another Audio Unit host application, download AU Lab to get started with auditioning your audio, detecting peaks and clipping, and performing double-blind listening tests.

AU Lab