When your record company or aggregator (CD-Baby, Tunecore etc.) submits your music to iTunes, Apple encodes it’s AAC format from your CD material, which consists of 16bit 44.1kHz resolution files (This is the final format generated by CD mastering). But with the tendency of CD masters being pushed to be “louder” and “hotter” (as a result of the Loudness War) it became obvious that excessively hot masters create a lot of problems (artifacts, distortion) for compression encoders such as Mp3, or the iTunes AAC format. Apple responded to this by creating a set of mastering conventions that encourage the use of more conservative mastering levels and by using as the source for generating it’s AAC files the original high resolution masters before they are formatted for CD. These files are the 24bit files created by the mastering engineer before conversion to CD and are of even higher quality than the CD tracks. By applying the MFiT conventions and tools provided by Apple, ArtOfAudio Mastering makes sure that your music is still sounding un-distorted and free of any conversion artifacts after submitting them to iTunes and can be sold under the superior quality label of: