Apple Digital Masters

What are Apple Digital Masters?

Apple Digital Masters (formerly known as ‘Mastered for iTunes’ or MFiT) are songs that have been mastered by a certified mastering engineer following certain guidelines and best practices to guarantee a high quality result without clipping distortion during conversion to lossy formats for sale or streaming.

Michael Briggs Mastering does NOT charge extra for Apple Digital Masters and unless otherwise specified all projects will conform to these specifications.

What does this mean for me? Why should I care?

This certification can help give you peace of mind knowing that your music will be treated with the upmost integrity and care. Your music will be labeled as an “Apple Digital Master” in the Apple Music store which is a positive sign for many buyers and listeners to know that your masters are high quality and worth a listen. It is one of very few ways to differentiate your music in their store where your options to stand out are limited. This can possibly help to increase your sales/streams (no guarantees of course) and open you up to a new market of audiophile listeners who seek out hi-res audio.

Only releases mastered by a certified engineer (such as Michael Briggs Mastering) are eligible to display the Apple Digital Masters badge (shown above) on their releases and marketing material.

What are some key requirements for being certified?

The two main attributes of an Apple Digital Master are:

• All files must be high definition masters with 24bit depth, instead of the standard 16bit found on CDs and most streaming services. Higher bit depth means larger dynamic range, so you can have a very wide range of quiet to loud with a lower noise floor. The sample rate can very between 44.1k  – 96k but must not be upsampled after mixing.
• The masters must not clip when converted to AAC for use in the Apple Music store. Clipping can occur when the master has too high of an output ceiling and the conversion process can create inter-sample peaks whith exceed digital zero and can cause clipping distortion. This distortion can be unpleasant and harsh to listen to and is generally not intended by the musician or artist and should be prevented.

Who distributes Apple Digital Masters?

Unfortunately not all of the digital distributors support ADM so please keep that in mind when choosing how to send your music to the streaming services. Note that you will need to enter my official email address when submitting your album for distribution for it to be accepted by Apple as an ADM. More info will be provided upon completion of your mastering job.

Services that support Apple Digital Masters:

• Distrokid – Supports ADM at no extra cost.
  Simply contact support to enable ADM uploads. More info here.
  Sign up with this link to get 7% off your first year.
• CD Baby – Supports ADM at an extra cost.
  Unfortunately they charge DOUBLE to submit a separate version of your album as an ADM. More info here.

Services that to NOT support Apple Digital Masters:

• Tunecore – Explicitly do NOT support ADM. More info here.

Any other questions?

Send me a message with the form below and feel free to send in a song now for a free test master.