Apple's trying to differentiate iTunes from its competitors with a new "Mastered for iTunes" section that's filled with high-fidelity, ear-pleasing music. These tracks are processed using a set of guidelines and tools that'll maintain as much of the sound quality of the original, uncompressed file as possible. As Ars Technica points out, most modern music tracks are recorded using 24-bit samples at 96 kHz or 192 kHz, depending on the processing power and storage space of the system. iTunes files are then compressed to a 256 kbps AAC "iTunes Plus" format, which loses 97 percent of
