14 DAY TRIAL // For as long as the iTunes Music Store has been around there have been debates on the quality of the audio encoding of the purchased tracks, with some people saying it is enough while others claim it is nowhere near CD quality. While this issue depends entirely on how sensitive ears you have, it might very well be that Apple will start catering to both groups at some point in the future.
AppleInsider reports that a new version of the iTunes Producer software has been released, and it offers support for the Apple Lossless format. This format was introduced in 2004 as a pat of QuickTime 6.5.1, and it is supposed to offer CD-quality audio in "about half the storage space." Later, support for this format was added into iTunes 4.5.
In the private release of iTunes Producer 1.4, the program distributed to record labels by Apple as a tool for prepping and submitting their content for inclusion on the iTunes Music Store, the company said that the software "now encodes music in Apple Lossless format, which produces larger audio files and will increase upload time."
So far it remains to be seen whether tracks will start appearing in Apple Lossless, and whether they will be priced differently than the current offerings, or if they will be priced the same, while AAC track will cost less. However, one small snag is that currently, the format does not utilize a digital rights management (DRM) scheme to assure copy-protection, however DRM might be applied the same way it is applied to other QuickTime file formats.