Apple Digital Masters

We are now offering Apple Digital Masters here at Fixed Mastering. This is a new announcement from Apple that emphasizes quality and consistency. Your mastering engineer at Fixed Mastering can provide you with an Apple Digital Master for your next release. Fixed Mastering is on the official providers list of studios and engineers who can offer Apple Digital Masters for their clients. Contact us today to get started on releasing your project with Apple Digital Master quality and certification!

By starting with the best possible masters we are able to offer our Apple Music and iTunes customers the highest possible quality audio. Our latest encoder can take advantage of every bit of the high-resolution masters that engineers are creating especially for us. The results, both for streaming and download, are virtually indistinguishable from the original 24 bit studio masters.

We previously offered Mastered for iTunes certified masters through our studio. Here’s a statement from Apple about the transition and rebranding:

Note: Apple Digital Masters replaces Mastered for iTunes as the name of the program to better reflect the fact that these audio advantages are available to our entire music catalog across the Apple ecosystem, whether streamed or downloaded. All Mastered for iTunes releases are now badged as Apple Digital Masters. All of the Mastered for iTunes software tools are still usable for Apple Digital Masters creation.

Mastered for iTunes

At Fixed Mastering we pride ourselves on providing our customers with the highest quality masters possible. We always make sure that we are up-to-date on all the latest trends and techniques in the audio world. Recently, we were awarded the “Mastered for iTunes” certification from Apple, and we are now on the official MFiT providers list.

Make sure to indicate which formats you will require on the Track Submission Form when submitting your music to us. We are looking forward to serving new and existing clients with this esteemed certification. Please feel free to contact us, as always, if you have any questions. To learn more about MFiT, take a look at the links below:

Apple - All About Mastered For iTunes

NPR - What ‘Mastered For iTunes’ Really Means

Mixing Techniques

We surveyed our Facebook group (Here's a link to request to join the group) about what mixing tip made them feel like an idiot, but mix ten times better. Here is what some of them had to say:

• Using one or two reverbs on a return channel instead of slapping different reverbs on everything

• how to properly set attack/release times on compressors and limiters

• How important distortion is to bring things to life. Just small amounts do wonders to so many thing

• Cutting more than boosting EQ

• Learning to use saturation and multi-band saturation instead of compression to boost rms, smooth peaks, add harmonics, etc. That and using a frequency analyzer that allows me to capture the curve from a reference sound/mix and compare what I'm doing to the reference sound/mix (Voxengo SPAN Plus does this really well).

• Setting my pre delay and reverb times right... use a delay time calculator to translate your bpms into seconds then use this time (or fractions of it) to set your predelays and reverbtimes. For example set the reverb of the snare so it is EXACTLY one quarter note (this is just an easy example).

• Recognizing when my ears and brain are spent then taking a day or two away from a particular project before coming back to it

• This is a controversial one:

  CLIPPING IS OK

• Tough question. I'd have to say: "learn your processing tools and also how to use them in unexpected ways." This has really shown me how powerful even stock plugins can be.

Ready to submit your track? Send it to us here!