iTunes: Not for Cutting Hi-Res. Discs
Posted on | August 25, 2008 |
The other day a musician came down from Orange County (”The OC!”) to deliver a disc for me with his finished mixes on it. He was skipping FTP because he said that he’d recorded at 24/192, and uploading files of that size just took too long.
When he arrived, he handed me a single CD. I immedialy knew something was wrong and when I inquired how he got 2gig of information onto a single CD-R, he said he’d cut the disc through iTunes.
I know that not all musicians are technical. I mean, that’s one of the reasons they come to me (other than obviously to get a well-mastered album). But iTunes is not a good medium to cut discs that you’re going to deliver for mastering.
In addition to truncating everything down to redbook standard (16/44.1), users may inadvertantly add fade-ins and processing, depending on how the program is set. Not good.
I’ve mentioned a lot of “prepping audio files for mastering” tips in a previous article, but the way things change, software-wise, everything anyone writes is quickly outdated (six months?).
There are lots os apps (third-party and built-in) to both OSX and XP/Vista to burn audio. My quick-and-dirty advise is to just double-check to make sure that the file size of what you burned is the same as what you rendered. If it’s not, something’s up.
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From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
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