Proposed (unofficial) digital media guidelines

The above is based on what I’ve seen stated in recent forum threads and in edit comments, but it’s possible that many editors who don’t participate in the forum are doing things differently.

Here are a few relevant comments from the forums:

@tigerman325 in Does inclusion of a digital booklet make a unique digital release? - #8 by tigerman325

We no longer separate hi-res releases from standard releases unless the timing on the tracks are different. It’s gotten a lot harder with the addition of Apple Music having hi-res as well as Deezer & Amazon. Also, it’s been proven that many times the “hi-res” releases are nothing more than standard that are blown up to hi-res or vice-versa. Much like different store mastering, i.e. Apple Digital Masters & Tidal Masters are no longer separate either."

@tigerman325 in Mastered for iTunes is now Apple Digital Masters - #4 by tigerman325

Apple doesn’t recognize an Apple Music release to be any different than an iTunes release. They give the same iTunes ID if there is no difference in barcode, label, etc. There are some instances in which the barcode for MFiT is shared with Spotify/Deezer, etc. that are the same as Apple Music as well.

@elomatreb in HD/Hi-Res/24-bit Music entries/Studio Quality Music - #2 by elomatreb

We generally do not track technical differences like sampling depth or even file type (lossless vs. lossy). … An additional concern is that it’s really hard to be sure that your high-resolution music is actually high-resolution, i.e. if it wasn’t just upsampled from a CD-quality recording (for the case of lossless music stores, it’s not that rare to get FLAC downloads where it’s immediately obvious from a spectrogram that they are just converted 128kbps MP3s).

@tigerman325 in HD/Hi-Res/24-bit Music entries/Studio Quality Music - #23 by tigerman325

We got rid of the mastered for iTunes being separate release a few years ago actually. I don’t think anyone is keeping those separate that I’ve seen. So, if you still run across them, merge them. I do. And haven’t been voted down on one in years. I still keep the hi-res separate, but I’d like to see attributes on links so we can stop keeping them separate, as stated before. Thanks for the comparison on the sample rates. I never knew that some “hi-res” releases are actually blown up from lower rates sometimes.

@zas in Conclusion of multiple digital media releases for 16 vs. 24-bit? - #9 by Zas

Hmmm, I wouldn’t go towards this direction [using file formats] to differentiate releases, simply because some stores provide hi-res FLAC or ALAC albums made from low quality (heavily compressed) MP3s, and some stores provide very high quality MP3s made from hires studio masters.

I’ll point out that I’ve seen forum comments as recent as mid-2022 that gave different advice, though.

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