Is iTunes all you need to master your album?
January 27th, 2007 by Derek
Ry Cooder apparently thinks so:
When he subjected the recording to his usual test—playback in his Toyota, on the factory-installed stereo—the result wasn’t to his liking. “It started to sound processed,” he said. [...] Then Mr. Cooder noticed something else: When he burned a copy of the album using Apple’s iTunes software, it sounded fine.
He didn’t know why until one of his younger engineers told him that the default settings on iTunes apply a “sound enhancer.” [...] Usually, that feature sweetens the sound of digital music files, but Mr. Cooder so liked its effect on his studio recordings that he used it to master—that is, make the final sound mixes—his album. “We didn’t do anything else to it,” he said.
Apparently Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have done something similar.
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3 Comments Add your own
1. Tony the Tech&hellip | January 28th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I think Ry must have had the mix really close before he let iTunes do its thing. Either that or he doesn’t mind other folks’ compressed mixes blasting out of listeners’ speakers because the band asked the engineer to turn it up to 11.
Everything I’ve burned from iTunes, when I leave it uncompressed, my guitar player says “it’s way to quiet, dude…” Maybe he has just spent too many days in front of a 200 watt Marshall.
2. Shane Hendricks&hellip | January 28th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
I couldn’t find anything about this in the iTunes documentation. “Sound enhancer” is for playback only; I guess you could use Sound Flower or AHP to capture that output to a file, or you could output to an external recorder. We discussed this at length on another board.
I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I’ve burned my own tunes with iTunes before and haven’t noticed any change (or improvement) in the sound quality.
Maybe he has a magical slide-guitar-blues version of iTunes that he won in his duel with Steve Vai in Crossroads.
3. Derek&hellip | January 28th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Perhaps the “Use Sound Check” checkbox also applies the Sound Enhancer if it’s activated? Sounds like something worth testing. But something like SoundFlower or Audio Hijack would be able to capture it if the story is inaccurate and he didn’t burn it directly.
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