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Topic: How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes (Read 4281 times) previous topic - next topic
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How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

I am curious to how iTunes and these other digital music stores rip the music that they sell.  Obviously since people are paying for these songs they cannot have any errors in them.  Do they actually rip them or do they use some other process that is more secure and faster?

How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

Reply #1
I seem to remember that i read somewhere that they used the original masters/dat's as source for the songs they sell on the iTunes Music Store.

I'm not 100% sure though.
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How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

Reply #2
i can almost picture a room of apple techs with EAC ripping 500k songs 

How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

Reply #3
Quote
I seem to remember that i read somewhere that they used the original masters/dat's as source for the songs they sell on the iTunes Music Store.

I'm not 100% sure though.

i don't know for sure but i can guess.

the record companies delivered to apple the uncompressed files on hard drives or maybe cdrom discs (which is very inefficient, a lot of discs will be needed for 500,000 songs) and then apple just compress the tracks in their aac "secure" format and upload them to the itunes store. now what do the record companies use to provide the music? probably just the standard cds. i doubt they deliver to apple 24-bit masters. the record companies rip the music to hard drives and then deliver it to apple.
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How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

Reply #4
I'm pretty sure I remember reading that Apple does NOT usually rip the songs, but instead provides a customized ripping/encoding application to the record companies to do it themselves. This would explain the varying levels of quality in iTMS tracks purchased by myself and others. Out of the 100 or so iTunes tracks I have bought, a small handful of them were obviously ripped by someone who did not know what heck they were doing. Peter Gabriel's "Security" album is a good example - you cannot even hear the music without massively adjusting the gain! All this talk about 24-bit masters-blah-blah is purely speculation and repeated rumors. The information that I remember is based on the Apple presentation that CDBaby reported on several months ago - unfortunately, the report has been pulled according to http://www.cdbaby.net/itunes so if anyone has any definitive source of information on this topic please post it by all means. I would love to proven wrong and find out that Apple is enforcing some sort of quality control.

How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

Reply #5
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All this talk about 24-bit masters-blah-blah is purely speculation and repeated rumors.

I believe Steve Jobs said in his keynote when he was unveiling the iTunes Music Store that they went to the original master types for encoding the files. 

If I remember correctly, he even said that because they went to the master tapes, some of the tunes were "better" than CD quality.

How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

Reply #6
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I believe Steve Jobs said in his keynote when he was unveiling the iTunes Music Store that they went to the original master types for encoding the files.


I'm pretty sure you're right, but I'm also sure that wasn't all of the material, only some of it - I recall there were certain qualifiers put into some of the statements.
 
Quote
If I remember correctly, he even said that because they went to the master tapes, some of the tunes were "better" than CD quality

This is Steve Jobs, right?  It depends on what the definition of "better" is

How Apple Rips Songs for iTunes

Reply #7
I finally found a mirror of the original article about Jobs' presentation:

http://www.gnutellanews.com/article/6830

The relevant quote is "It's up to the partner/label to submit all the metadata (artist name, release date, song tiles, etc.), do the audio encoding, and upload the materials."