Music from youtube sound quality?

JG009

For the purpose of this discussion I mean your own music that you own that you uploaded to youtube.

If you were to save the audio from that youtube video, is it ever going to be as good as say a 320k mp3 you saved from the original WAV file. Assuming it was a HD video you uploaded, with decent audio (if people want to get into bitrates and sample rates thats cool).

Or are you wasting your time. Just interested to hear the opinions from those of you who know your stuff. Thanks.

*since googling the subject apparently youtube max audio quality is 128k.

drumdrum

I agree the sound quality s a bit poor, but with all of the millions of videos uploaded to youtube each week, the poor fellows over at youtube have to figure out a way to keep the file sizes to a minimum.

Seeing as how most non-audiophiles like Joe Public dont seem to really mind about 128K audio, I doubt this will change soon....:(

mike65

To be fair its not a site designed for audio quality, pictures first on youtube hence the name. I have two stereo tracks uploaded and both sound fair but have slight "artifacts" that were created during the processing at their end.
The vid was created using Windows Movie Maker from a 16/44 wav file.

You can hear slight buzzing on this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSRJWz9rzFA

11811

As mentioned youtube is primarily for video, the audio quality ain't great when streaming or downloading.

If you're just using it as a means of putting your music out, there much better sites for good audio streaming like Soundcloud or Bandcamp, while they don't support video you can link them from your youtube video,for those who want to listen to you tracks in better quality audio.

To be honest I hardly ever listen to music on youtube.

JG009

Thanks folks, no I was just asking because it is a personal pet hate of mine when I ask people where they got it from and say youtube. I didn't know the whole ins and outs of it , but guessing that something isnt going to add up - I guess my frustration comes from expecting audiophile stuff from joe public.

Doge

There is a much better alternative - Vimeo.


http://vimeo.com/help/compression



Its not so much the bitrate is the problem with youtube,
its the way it compresses the peaks, it really does boost the ***e out of the audio.

Just like the old myspace player, (no idea if the new one suffers the same problem)

krd

waveform wrote: »

Its not so much the bitrate is the problem with youtube,
its the way it compresses the peaks, it really does boost the ***e out of the audio.

There are ways of getting crystal clear audio on Youtube. A lot of the record company stuff is very good.

The compression on youtube will give your sound funny aliasing if it doesn't like what you've given it.

What I've found - the louder what you've uploaded is, the less aliasing.

Doge

krd wrote: »

There are ways of getting crystal clear audio on Youtube. A lot of the record company stuff is very good.

The compression on youtube will give your sound funny aliasing if it doesn't like what you've given it.

What I've found - the louder what you've uploaded is, the less aliasing.

Yeah thats an excellent way of getting crystal clear audio on youtube,
set up a major record lablel, and then you won't have to worry about bad audio quality on your channel ever again!

One has to wonder if theres a difference in the processing for the record companies uploads
compared to Joe Blogg's uploads, a few blind A/B tests would be cool.

Being forced to make the audio track really Loud prior to uploading, is still a big problem as good digital audio quality is dependent on adequate headroom also, there should be an option to disable youtube's "audio optimization!"

Paolo_M

There's a good article over on Recording Review at the moment on this very subject.
He's using a 320k AAC mixed a various RMS and peak values and uploaded at various rates for his tests.
If this article is anything worth going by then it turns out if you upload at 720p or 1080p and listen that rate, then uTube does very little (if anything) to your audio.
http://forum.recordingreview.com/content/youtube-audio-reverse-engineering-18/
I did kinda suspect that from my own experiments anyway, I've only tried uploading @ 1080p once, and it took the guts of a day for a 2-3 min video, but I could tell much of a difference between it and the original file.
I reckon the record label channel force 720p or 1080p, which probably also explains why they take longer to stream.

drum!

I would definitely embrace Youtube as a platform for getting your music out there but i would be including links to platforms with hi-res audio (soundcloud/bandcamp) in the information below it for people who want to hear it properly. Youtube has 30% of the global online music market when it comes to listenership so you have to be involved with them in some way.

krd

waveform wrote: »

Yeah thats an excellent way of getting crystal clear audio on youtube,
set up a major record lablel, and then you won't have to worry about bad audio quality on your channel ever again!

One has to wonder if theres a difference in the processing for the record companies uploads
compared to Joe Blogg's uploads, a few blind A/B tests would be cool.

Being forced to make the audio track really Loud prior to uploading, is still a big problem as good digital audio quality is dependent on adequate headroom also, there should be an option to disable youtube's "audio optimization!"

I think the major labels are getting special treatment. Though I've seen some indie stuff that's of very high quality - no preceptable aliasing.

They had a feature for a while where you could upload an MP3 separately and then you could switch it with another video. As far as I'm aware that's now gone. But that was a way people were getting higher audio quality.

It's down to Youtube/google. They should just allow a feature where you can chose the priority of the compression - ie for sound.

Soundcloud take the peak volume of a track as the max volume - so if you're uploading to soundclound you should always make sure you've remove the more outre peaks.

krd

drum! wrote: »

I would definitely embrace Youtube as a platform for getting your music out there but i would be including links to platforms with hi-res audio (soundcloud/bandcamp) in the information below it for people who want to hear it properly. Youtube has 30% of the global online music market when it comes to listenership so you have to be involved with them in some way.

Yes, but, if the sound quality is crap, the sound quality is crap. It took me a few attempts with Youtube to get anything listening back to. I didn't really know what I was doing. My first attempts completely wrecked the audio quality.

Anima

I read about a tip for increasing the quality recently. It's something I've noticed on some videos / music I've listened to as well but I thought it was just the uploader making the video wrong in the first place.

If you upload a video where it is longer than the actual piece of audio i.e. you have a track of audio that's 3 minutes long but the video itself is 5 minutes long, the quality of the audio will be better.

I can't remember the specific details but its basically because the compression rate is variable. So if you have a large section of audio thats just silence, its more generous to the audio thats not or something to that effect.

Dunno if its still a valid tip anymore but I see a lot of videos that are much longer than the audio itself and they usually sound good.