Apple Music now lets Indie Artists in.

[Nick Sevilla]

So that will be interesting.

Watch out for their Apple Codecs. All of them make weird little "overshoots" AKA peaks when encoding your audio to their streaming delivery systems.

This basically means that, if your master is, say, -1 dBTP (FS, whatever), it will absolutely shoot over that, sometimes into the red. If your music is bright sounding, well, you'd better rethink that. Cause bright makes it worse. LOL.

The worst offender, of course, is the smallest one, the 64 kBit streaming one. That is like a weasel pumping your music through its arse, after consuming a few grams of coke. Bastard!

My Mastering Engineer friends literally lost their shit when they saw what it was doing to my mixes.

We are supposed to always mix to the worst possible sound system. Well, now, that new "lowest possible shit" system is their shit 64 kBit Codec.

Master to that, and you won't have issues with the other ones, as they don't overshoot by as much.

Cheers. I accept Paypal only. LOL.

[punkrockdude]

That is unfortunately what happens with almost all lossy audio codecs. Opus, Vorbis, MP3, AAC, etc. You can study this somewhat by downloading i.e. Foobar2000 and encode music to your lossy codec of choice and then ReplayGain scan (using also Foobar2000) them and see how far over 1.0 the peaks have gone.

1.00 = 0 dBFS (no headroom left)

Below 0 dBFS:

• 0.75 = 3 dBFS headroom

• 0.50 = 6 dBFS headroom

• 0.25 = 12 dBFS headroom

Above 0 dBFS:

• 1.25 = 1.5 dBFS overshoot

• 1.5 = 3 dBFS overshoot

• 2.0 = 6 dBFS overshoot

The good thing though is that if the decoder outputs float instead of integer than the peaks do not mean clipping and can be almost no problem if the audio track is then loudness normalized and the peaks all land below 0 dBFS. Most streaming services that I have tried offer loudness normalizing and most tracks' volumes are lowered making clipping occurance less probable.

Please correct me if I something is incorrect.

[The Scum]

Please correct me if I something is incorrect.

You might proofread your negative value table.

[The Scum]

To the thesis statement in the headline: how do indie artists get into Apple Music?

The support article at Apple says to go through a third party - Tunecore, CDBaby, etc. It's been like that for years, and nothing has changed.

https://artists.apple.com/support/1108- ... pple-music

[punkrockdude]

Please correct me if I something is incorrect.

You might proofread your negative value table.

Thank you! It didn't look good but I hope it is correct now.!

[Nick Sevilla]

To the thesis statement in the headline: how do indie artists get into Apple Music?

The support article at Apple says to go through a third party - Tunecore, CDBaby, etc. It's been like that for years, and nothing has changed.

https://artists.apple.com/support/1108- ... pple-music

Yes, but there is no discernment as to the quality of the content, nor the technical quality of the material. No one is filtering out the garbage, worse than before. But, at least someone will make tons of money. It won't be the artists.

This is somehow all news to some of my engineer buddies, at least the ones still working for the big labels.

[digitaldrummer]

I've been sending my garbage to Apple Music for some time now...

[trodden]

I've been sending my garbage to Apple Music for some time now...

https://music.apple.com/us/artist/blackqueen/1487278931

[Nick Sevilla]

So I guess their stuff about Apple music on their site is old then... They did "refresh" the graphics on the website. But not the actual Music stuff. LOL.

[trodden]

Went to re-listen to our last record, on Apple Music. Holy Fuck it sounds horrible. I don't mess with streaming much outside of BandCamp, which sounds fine for me, but this is hot fucking garbage.

[Nick Sevilla]

Went to re-listen to our last record, on Apple Music. Holy Fuck it sounds horrible. I don't mess with streaming much outside of BandCamp, which sounds fine for me, but this is hot fucking garbage.

Yep. I just mastered a new album for a client, and had to fight the effing "Mastered for Apple" droplets and codecs. They truly suck arse. Once I got them decent in there, I know the rest of the streaming services will be much much better.

Used a Plugin Alliance plugin called ADPTR Streamliner. Give you a decent idea of most of the online streaming codecs and how they mangle your stuff.