Axehole

According to the New York Times, guitarist Ry Cooder used an unusual approach to mastering his latest album: he used an iTunes preset.

Last year, as Mr. Cooder worked on My Name Is Buddy, an oddball folk and blues concept album about a red cat that travels through a mythic American landscape, he ran into familiar problems. When he subjected the recording to his usual test — playback in his Toyota, on the factory-installed stereo — the result wasn’t to his liking.

“It started to sound processed,” he said. “We were losing the feeling of the thing, and this is not music that can withstand this.”

Then Mr. Cooder noticed something else: When he burned a copy of the album using Apple’s iTunes software, it sounded fine. He didn’t know why until one of his younger engineers told him that the default settings on iTunes apply a “sound enhancer.” Mr. Cooder liked its effect on his studio recordings so well that he used it to master his album. “We didn’t do anything else to it,” he said.

Mr. Cooder is most likely the first well-known musician to master his album using iTunes, but other producers have also noticed its effect.

“When we made the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record, they would listen to it on the iTunes presets and say it sounded pretty good,” said Dave Fridmann, a producer who has worked with that band. “It beefs things up and brightens them and you can definitely tell the difference.”