Apple has just revealed that it has been slowly rolling out Apple Digital Masters, a new initiative that aims to provide Apple Music subscribers and iTunes Store customers the best sounding music.
The roots of Apple Digital Masters can be traced back to the company's "Mastered for iTunes" programme.
Introduced in 2012, it was a programme that set forth a set of guidelines and tools that sound engineers could use to optimize their music for iTunes by encoding tracks from high-resolution master recordings.
The aim was to create high-quality audio files that were imperceptible from the original master recordings but without the hefty file sizes of traditional lossless audio formats like FLAC.
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In other words, Apple Digital Masters is not typical high-res audio, but the upside is that folks who often stream music on the go can get better quality audio with no penalty to data usage.
According to Apple, about 75 per cent of the Top 100 songs in the US and 71 per cent of the Top 100 global songs are currently Apple Digital Masters.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to tell for now. However, some users have reported seeing an Apple Digital Master logo in the "File" section of some tracks in the new Music app in macOS Catalina. We tried, but we didn't see the logo appear in our Music app in macOS Catalina.
Apple will offer Apple Digital Masters tracks to users on Apple Music and the iTunes Store at no extra cost.
This article was first published in Hardware Zone.