Apple has announced a new initiative called “Apple Digital Masters.” Earlier, the company was running a program called Mastered for iTunes. It seems like Apple has rebranded the Mastered for iTunes into Apple Digital Masters.

Mastered for iTunes aimed at preserving and offering high-quality audio. With this program timeless albums from Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and others sounded better. The engineers apparently used a set of guidelines and tools to optimize the music for the digital download format. In other words, the program strived to create studio-quality sound files with quality comparable to the master recordings. Essentially Apple is grouping all the Mastered for iTunes albums and calling it Apple Digital Masters.

Apple explains that most of the top releases are Apple Digital Masters and this mainly includes songs from Top 100 and other charts. It is worth noting that iTunes will be replaced by the Music app in macOS Catalina.

That being said Apple is yet to add a lossless music library to Apple Music. Perhaps they can charge more for those of us who want lossless songs. In 2015, Tidal had offered a Hi-Fi subscription tier which was priced double the regular subscription. Spotify seems to have experimented with the idea as well. The company sent promo messages that promised lossless, hi-fi quality audio at $5 premium a month. Meanwhile, Amazon is expected to offer its hi-fi service later this year.

How to see if a song is an Apple Digital Master

Apple has never made the distinction between usual songs and the Apple Digital Master song visible. However, you can right-click and check the file info. Hopefully, Apple will also make it easier to identify songs that are given an Apple Digital Master treatment.