Music Distribution 101: Audio Quality and Format

This article is designed to help you get your audio files ready for distribution. Whether it’s a single or an album you’re releasing, Boomplay and other digital stores have certain requirements for the audio files delivered to them. Makes sense, right? They want music with high-quality sound, which makes them, and you, look better.

To properly upload your music to Afrotunes for the distribution to the digital stores, all audio files need to meet certain specs.

Stereo Formats:

AIF, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, M4A, OGG Or WAV, up to 192kHz, 16-bit, 24-bit

Track File Size:

1MB to 1GB

If the description above seems quite strange to you, below are some key points we need to share with you.

To begin with, the two most used audio formats are WAV and MP3 files, so which is better? Most musicians would upload WAV files because WAV files are lossless, uncompressed and broadcast CD quality music files. MP3 files are compressed with loss to some extent.

Your music may get remastered or reprogrammed by the distributor or the digital stores during distribution, in this case, the lossless WAV files will be committed to the original quality of your music.

The next thing is the audio resolution, it is not as important as the audio format but still can be an essential factor to your audiences. In the 1980s, most Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD) uses 16 bits per sample. As time went by, DVD-Audio and Blu-ray Disc can support up to 24 bit.

Now we have a question, which audio resolution should you choose when recording? Our advice is better to record at 24-bit and convert to 16-bit than it is to record straight to 16-bit. The conversion process gathers the errors into the last 8 bits and dumps them.

After you upload your tracks to your Afrotunes account, you can click the play button and listen to a bit to confirm your audio file.

Don’t be afraid if the playback of your song isn’t as high in quality as your original file. This lower quality is only in the playback feature and does not affect the file going to stores. We deliver the highest-quality file that each store accepts, usually the same file that you uploaded.

Check out more at afrotunesdigital.com and sign up for free.

You can also check our previous article for more details about Afrotunes.

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*Limited offer: free music distribution service to Boomplay. (original price:1.99$ per artist)