Sony Music leverages iTunes in a unique way...read more

After a really long wait, Indian users can now buy music, movies and books from the iTunes stores in local currency and at friendly prices since its launch in December 2012. Global music giant, Sony Music, made available half a million songs, including Bollywood, International and Tamil Soundtracks to the iTunes store. Today, to enhance the musical experience, Sony Music for the first time in India will be releasing the MFIT (mastered for iTunes) versions, specially mastered for higher fidelity sound, for two big albums in Tamil and Hindi. Maryan Directed by ace director Bharat Bala starring the multi-talented Dhanush and the ravishing Parvathi Menon with music by multiple Grammy Award winner A R Rahman & the much awaited film Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, with music composed by the musical trio Shankar – Ehsaan – Loy with Prasoon Joshi’s lyrics. The sound of these two album on iTunes will be of the highest quality and has been specially mastered and engineered at iTunes certified studios. Mastered for iTunes is an aid to mixing and mastering engineers in creating the best-sounding tracks possible when converted to the lossy 256Kbps audio format commonly used. Currently, this section contains roughly 100 albums, spanning classics and masterpieces like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On, numerous classical albums, U2's Achtung Baby to name a few. The music you listen to, no matter what the format, sounds worse than it does in the studio where it was recorded. That's not just because musicians and recording engineers have better equipment than you do, but because the recordings themselves contain more information. Today, most studio tracks are recorded at 24 bits. The process of mastering a recording is taking the raw, mixed song and copying it to another format, with adjustments in the amount of information that can be transferred to the new medium and attendant tweaks to ensure it sounds as good as possible given the new format's limitations. The music on standard commercial CDs is encoded at 16 bits. Mastering a song or album "for iTunes" means that it'll sound better, while remaining just as portable. For Bob Ludwig, a mastering engineer who remastered Coldplay's latest album, Mylo Xyloto, for the new "Mastered for iTunes" store, says, “From a technical viewpoint, there are cases where the 24-bit AAC file would be superior to the lossless CD. I did an early demonstration for some engineer friends of mine and the difference between the 'Mastered for iTunes' file I created and the one that was ripped from a 16-bit CD was easily heard on the little speakers on my MacBook Pro." For the first time the finer detailed and lavish productions for both these albums can be enjoyed through little earphones and speakers.