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YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

audiomisc.co.uk

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Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#51

Post by phonon »

xipix wrote: post #48
phonon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think time stretching is done natively by your browser, not by Youtube at all. I use https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed on sites...allows any media to be stretched. Did you try another browser?

That's no excuse for YouTube because (a) audio processing can be done in JS/WASM and (b) they have the influence to improve browser playbackRate implementations to something better [1]. Besides, their Android and iOS apps do slow music as bad if not worse than on web. [1] https://bungee.parabolaresearch.com/compare-audio-stretch-te...

Which one in that list is better than the default one in Chrome? What media serving sites that you know of intentionally don't use native browser APIs?

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#52

Post by naltroc »

When I use an FFT to view the spectrogram on YouTube music videos, it is very obvious that YouTube applies a lowpass filter at 16kHz on all videos (true since 2023 at least).

While this does retain the majority of useful information, it explains why the youtube version of your song feels just a little more 'lifeless' than the high quality version you have elsewhere.

The original recording contains high frequency detail that got lost. Your human body uses that high frequency detail to orient itself in space with respect to sound sources (like reverb, reflections, or ambient sounds).

It is interesting from a data storage point of view because this could result in massive savings. Consider audio is recorded at 44.1khz or 48kHz but is actually stored at 32kHz. They have effectively saved 25% in audio file storage at marginal customer experience.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#53

Post by xyst »

Billions of dollars at their disposal. A near monopsony or just massive buyer of infrastructure, and some of the smartest people in the space. Yet the best they could do in 2022 is lossy codec at 120-190 bit rate?

I got better audio quality ripping songs from limewire or Napster in the 2000s.

Why do we settle with this substandard quality? Oh wait, YT barely has any competition and subsidized by G. No need for competition. Just shove ads down users throats and sell of their usage data.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#54

Post by anamexis »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #26
togetheragainor wrote: post #22

For music listening, the YouTube Music app has settings for higher audio quality under "Settings > Playback". According to their documentation, this is "Upper bound of 256kbps AAC & OPUS": https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9076559?hl=en... EDIT: FWIW, I'm a Premium member. I'm not sure if this is a standard feature.

I wonder if I upload a video to standard Youtube and tag it 'music' so it's shows up over on Youtube Music does it get a better audio quality than the video encode gets?

I don't think you need to tag it as music. You can listen to any Youtube video in the Youtube Music app.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#55

Post by edflsafoiewq »

xyst wrote: post #53

Billions of dollars at their disposal. A near monopsony or just massive buyer of infrastructure, and some of the smartest people in the space. Yet the best they could do in 2022 is lossy codec at 120-190 bit rate? I got better audio quality ripping songs from limewire or Napster in the 2000s. Why do we settle with this substandard quality? Oh wait, YT barely has any competition and subsidized by G. No need for compet…

Lossy codecs at 120-190k in 2022 are probably transparent.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#56

Post by TacticalCoder »

eqvinox wrote: post #47

Including 44.1kHz in the analysis is ignorant of the fact that most consumer audio equipment made in the past decade or two cannot switch its clock source and physical playback sample rate to that anymore. It's all 48kHz (or multiples of that, for snake oil) these days, starting with when Intel cemented HDA on a 24MHz clock. Playing back anything 44.1kHz just gets resampled at some point before hitting the DAC, in mo…

[dead]

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#57

Post by perching_aix »

dylan604 wrote: post #30
xipix wrote: post #17

Nice analysis, for 1x playback speed. If you're playing back at a different speed, for example, for music practice, YouTube audio is awful. Why doesn't this huge AV platform use a better audio time stretch algorithm?

Because this is such a niche use the number of users taking advantage of this "feature" would be so small as to not get anybody a promotion

How did you become this convinced that it's some niche, unused feature? I'd go as far as to say it's essential. So many videos, especially of courses, out there that really need that 1.25x playback rate boost.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#58

Post by strogonoff »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #25

Anyone uploading audio different platforms might find Streamliner useful (I'm nowhere near the point where details on that level matter). https://adptraudio.com/product/streamliner/ It's wild how many details sound people have to keep track of. I know when I upload to Youtube things get smoothed noticeably compared to say Soundcloud. Probably because I've mastered over their -14 LUFS requirement. I wonder how much of…

My theory about the more widespread use of subtitles when watching modern film and TV productions is that it is in large part due to screenwriters trying to write (and directors to direct) more realistic dialogue. Just by itself, everything else equal, realistic speech is necessarily harder to grok than “played out” theatrical. In real life people who can hear generally benefit from drastically higher fidelity and wider dynamic range of sound, as well as many more cues and context compared to a linear film (plus the ability to ask someone to repeat). This clashes with screenwriters having to[0] put crucial information in the dialogue, the rule of only saying something once, and other writing and production practices (which also exist for a reason). Realistic dialogue that is easy to grok requires cooperation from many sides.

That said, technical aspects matter, recording practices, mastering for loudness with little dynamic range (so that compressed voice blends with foley and the rest), and indeed encoding can definitely affect the ease of understanding human speech. Speaking of encoding… I couldn’t find it on the site, is Streamliner a one-time purchase?

[0] Well, not every film has to (Upstream Color comes to mind, as an example of a film with relatively little plot-advancing dialogue), but it seems that the majority of productions rely on dialogue and it isn’t going away.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#59

Post by miunau »

ricardobeat wrote: post #42
jeffbee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worse problem for YouTube Music is that some of the source material is not the same as what you may have on physical media. There are entire labels that provide worse or at least different materials than they published to record stores. And then there is remaster roulette. What am I going to hear if I press play on "Rumours": the original that was born perfect, or one of the half-dozen remasters that have been is…

One of the advantages of Apple Music’s digital masters. They require no clipping which alone vastly improves a majority of albums.

Where did you hear this from? For the vast majority, Apple Music gets the same masters as sent to every other service.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#60

Post by [deleted] »

eqvinox wrote: post #47

Including 44.1kHz in the analysis is ignorant of the fact that most consumer audio equipment made in the past decade or two cannot switch its clock source and physical playback sample rate to that anymore. It's all 48kHz (or multiples of that, for snake oil) these days, starting with when Intel cemented HDA on a 24MHz clock. Playing back anything 44.1kHz just gets resampled at some point before hitting the DAC, in mo…

[deleted]
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