Untouched/Touched iTunes files?

Some visitors ask me “Why did you add [iTunes Plus AAC M4A] on the post tiltle?” so here is my answer !

iTunes Plus AAC M4A is an official format from iTunes which is optimized to have the best audio quality within reasonable file size. Nowadays you can find  a lot of iTunes Plus music online that has been modified and recoded, which causes the quality to become degraded.  And there’s also a lot of sites that try to post the fake files as real iTunes Plus AAC M4A. Since there’s so may different kinds of touched and recoded music, please find the guide to show how you can identify real and untouched files as following:

To begin, right-lick on a song or video in iTunes and select “Get Info”

1. Kind must be “Purchased AAC audio file” for Music and “Purchased MPEG-4 video file” for Videos, below are TOUCHED examples:

2. Bit Rate must be “256 kbps” (this applies for Music only, Videos will have different Bit Rates), below is a TOUCHED example:

3. Purchased by, Account Name, Purchase Date all must have complete information, below are TOUCHED examples:

UNTOUCHED File Example Below:

4. Right-click on your iTunes top column and check the “Release Date“, all Music and Videos must have release date, below are some examples:

(Sometimes this information is missing from Videos even if they are officially downloaded from iTunes).

5. All UNTOUCHED Music and Videos should have official “Artwork“, You can still get Album Artwork for Music from iTunes if it is deleted, but for Videos there’s no way to get Artwork from iTunes if it is deleted, so it’s important to keep the original Artwork.

6. Changing editable information like title, artist, album, track number, comment, lyrics, etc… is not considered as TOUCHED because iTunes freely allows the user to do it.

Special thanks to Paco (from Viz4u) for this information !