www.psneurope.com
March 2013 l 23
studiofeature
Phil Ward unravels the challenge to
mastering posed by the iTunes phenomenon and digital delivery
PUBLISHED IN Geneva last August, the EBU document The Carriage of Identifiers in the Broadcast Wave Format sets out the standard that the UK’s Music Producers Guild hoped for: a consistent, organisation- to-organisation way of including a unique identifier within a BWF file. Its central tenet is a definition of how the data stored in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) ‘chunk’ of the file should be expressed every time, to avoid confusion and to allow safe expansion of the amount of metadata carried with the audio.
The most important pieces of XML, from the point of view of mastering, are the International Standard Recording Codes (ISRC) that contain the credits necessary as the music flies around the digital ether. Broadcast usage, royalties, song identification, remastering security and several other key aspects of asset management should benefit from this breakthrough, although there are still issues concerning the precise location of audio data and metadata.
The MPG is currently in talks with the Producers & Engineers Wing of the Grammy Organization, with the main aim of ensuring that support for the initiative is backed by a clear understanding of how each file should be constructed. Alchemy Mastering’s Barry Grint explains why. “The Grammy Organization received funding
Ray Staff of Air Mastering (this studio) is working with Apple to keep the technology giant abreast of
developments in the mastering world
Algorithm and blues
the information or to correct errors. So if the metadata is in the file you can’t update it. Furthermore, if all the possible metadata is included in the file, it adds to the file size. While this isn’t an issue when considered against a video file, it’s not an elegant answer if, say, 20% of the file size is data headers.” The MPG would rather have
the ISRC contain a link to the internet, says Grint. “If the information is held in a database online, it can be kept up to date because the ISRC will always be the reference. Some of the information, such as royalty breaks and so on, would be in
consortium DDEX in an attempt to standardise credits and rights management, and broadly supports the inclusion of ISRCs in BWF files even if a universal recommendation is yet to emerge. It was also instrumental in another key development in digital delivery as it affects mastering, courtesy of IT-for-creatives giant Apple.
MFiT FOR PURPOSE Apple is flagging up its Mastered for iTunes (MFiT) campaign as a means of supplying “music as the artist and sound engineer intended”. As independent mastering
“We went from vinyl to cassette, now from CD to iTunes… but, even when we knew that excellent masters would be played on a Dansette, we tried to make the best records we could. That’s what we do: get it to sound the best it can on all releases””
Crispin Murray
from the Library of Congress to look at the issue of metadata,” he points out, “and were heading down the path of putting all the metadata in the audio file. The problem with this approach is that, once the file has been bought, it’s impossible to update
an online database with access only to those eligible to view it. You would never want to put that in the public domain via a file header.” Currently the Grammy
Organization is working closely with digital supply chain
consultant Crispin Murray pointed out in January’s PSNEurope, this raises as many questions as it answers. It’s now being suggested that Apple may provide a higher-resolution version that will use Fraunhofer’s HD-AAC codec,
The Sonnox-Fraunhofer Pro-Codec was created as a collaboration between Sonnox and Fraunhofer IIS
a lossless process admired by mastering engineers including those within the MPG Mastering Group. At the end of February Grint,
Ray Staff and Stevan Krakovic, representing the MPG Mastering Group, held a meeting with Apple – known to be a supporter of ISRC in BWF and a potentially powerful lobbyist in the US for its adoption. At the moment Apple is not commenting on the details of the strategy, but Staff reports that he’s working very closely with the corporation in order to move forward. “For me, it’s about finding the best working process to prepare files for MFiT,” he says, “and there are several issues around exactly
how the Apple Mac receives and plays them. We’re also keeping Apple abreast of developments in the mastering world, such as the changes to the BWF specification that address ISRC. It has great potential for Apple and the music industry, if it’s adopted in the right way.”
PRO-CODEC V2 Within the manufacturing sector, there are signs of acceptance that digital distribution is here to stay. Version 2 of the award-winning Pro-Codec plug-in has now been released by Sonnox- Fraunhofer, building upon the original plug-in’s ability to audition, encode and decode audio with codecs such as MP3 and AAC in real-time. This
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