Mastering for itunes

[tas]

Lets share our thoughts on what practice pyramix users keep for that.

For example do you use the apple tools or the pmx encoder?

Do we really have to keep it down to -1dbfs even if our tp meter gives us the green light at higher peaks?

[fl]

Do we really have to keep it down to -1dbfs even if our tp meter gives us the green light at higher peaks?

Firstly I thought it was supposed to be -1.5 dBFS - am I wrong there? I believe that the headroom is not for the True Peak condition of an uncompressed file format, but because of the automatic trans-coding of Apple's intake process, to convert PCM material to AAC and MP3, where the risks of generating inter-sample overs are more prevalent.

[Graemme]

The final output level is determined by the MfiT tool's clipping detector...there is no fixed amount of 'headroom' that will work in all cases. I've experienced required attenuation values from 0.5 to 3.5dB...all very programme dependent (as I'd expect...).

TAS, to answer your question, I use Apple's tools, (in non-realtime) running on my Mac laptop. I have the Sonnox realtime codec monitoring tools but I've yet to run the Mac version...I may just get a Mac-mini at some point to check in realtime, switching back and forth with the LPCM output of Pyramix.

Occasionally, I'll do something a little different to an MfiT master, based on what I hear in the encoder's processing, but certainly not as a matter of habit.