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YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

productionadvice.co.uk

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Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#11

Post by MrJagil »

rodgerd wrote: post #8
tobr wrote: post #7

I wonder if this is about ending the "loudness war", or if it's more about helping amateur content with nearly inaudible levels. All the good reasons for compressing music or audio in general certainly apply to YouTube. The average viewer will probably listen through laptop speakers in a noisy environment, and a large dynamic range is not helpful to them. Also, does this mean they actually lower the volume of high RM…

> The average viewer will probably listen through laptop speakers in a noisy environment, and a large dynamic range is not helpful to them. If you use compression on the assumption that a chunk of your audience will be listening on shitty speakers you ensure that anyone not listening on shitty speakers also gets a shitty experience. Perhaps Google would like YouTube to be a non-shitty experience for people with nice…

> anyone not listening on shitty speakers also gets a shitty experience

This hyperbole serves no one. Modern limiters are tremendously transparent, and only people who are listening for it will notice the increase in compression.

That said, there is a case to be made for listener fatigue. Personally, I'm not on youtube for extended periods where that would be a problem, but I can see how it might be. Further, as a musician and engineer, I have long had to live with the fact that none of the streaming services (not even iTunes the app) are transparent. After having spent days on a mix and master, it's quite a shame I don't get to decide how the exact final product is sonically presented.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#12

Post by smcl »

djloche wrote: post #4

I don't mind the actual tracks having various mixing/mastering. I do mind when a commercial is compressed/mastered with the intent to be perceived louder to stand out from the actual music/video that you are watching.

I don't think we (the consumers\audience) are ever going to win that war.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#13

Post by tobr »

rodgerd wrote: post #8
tobr wrote: post #7

I wonder if this is about ending the "loudness war", or if it's more about helping amateur content with nearly inaudible levels. All the good reasons for compressing music or audio in general certainly apply to YouTube. The average viewer will probably listen through laptop speakers in a noisy environment, and a large dynamic range is not helpful to them. Also, does this mean they actually lower the volume of high RM…

> The average viewer will probably listen through laptop speakers in a noisy environment, and a large dynamic range is not helpful to them. If you use compression on the assumption that a chunk of your audience will be listening on shitty speakers you ensure that anyone not listening on shitty speakers also gets a shitty experience. Perhaps Google would like YouTube to be a non-shitty experience for people with nice…

This is of course what the "war" is about at its core - do we prefer to to sound OK everywhere, but not great anywhere, or do we prefer to sound great for some people, but be inaudible to others.

The right answer depends on the content, context and audience. The choice is with the content creator, not with YouTube, and for many content creators optimizing for people with bad speakers is the right choice. Lowering the volume is not going to make "shitty" compression unshitty.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#14

Post by rl3 »

AlyssaRowan wrote: post #6
rl3 wrote: post #2

> And if you’ve spotted the big problem with the way it works, you know it needs to be discussed. Anyone know what he's alluding to? > But the loudness won’t be lifted if clipping would be caused in the process That would have been my first guess, thankfully it isn't the case.

I'm not sure what he's alluding to. It may be that they've done simple loudness normalisation instead of one of the more preferable, advanced techniques, like ReplayGain 1.0, R128, or BS.1770 (/ReplayGain 2.0)?

Some of these techniques appear to (optionally) take the entire album into account when conducting normalization.

Maybe that's it. Due to its nature, YouTube tends to lend itself to album fragmentation. It's not uncommon for people to have an entire album on their playlist where no two tracks were uploaded together, let alone even share the same uploader.

In this scenario, barring some sort of mitigation strategy, any seamless transitions between tracks would most likely be destroyed. Each track would have been normalized individually.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#15

Post by vanderZwan »

Joona wrote: post #3

Good. I absolutely hate videos that are so low volume that I have to turn Youtube up to 100%, and then adjust volume in Windows too, to hear anything. And then imagine finding one of the louder videos next. I've tried to give people advice on volume levels, but it feels like no one is willing to do it. Hopefully Twitch will do something similar soon, too.

I think that is exactly the motivation: avoiding the random shifts in volume between videos. Pushing back against the loudness war was probably just a bonus.

It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#16

Post by click170 »

smcl wrote: post #12
djloche wrote: post #4

I don't mind the actual tracks having various mixing/mastering. I do mind when a commercial is compressed/mastered with the intent to be perceived louder to stand out from the actual music/video that you are watching.

I don't think we (the consumers\audience) are ever going to win that war.

Stuff like that bugs me too, and is one of the reasons I have no compunction about pirating content.

VLC supports a dynamic range audio compressor, meaning you can configure it to make the quiet parts loud, and the loud parts quiet.

If they want to play those bullshit games with the volume of commercials, then I'll play dirty too by using pirated content that has every single commercial removed, and will employ the dynamic range compressor as well to make sure the quiet parts of shows are audible and the loud parts aren't irritating. I just feel sorry for the poor saps who have to tolerate these bullshit shenanigans when even the regulators have been calling out inexplicably loud commercials.

Then again with how cheap Raspberry Pis are, maybe we're closer to everyone using pirated content than we are to get Hollywood and producers of commercials to stop the BS.

Balls in your court Hollywood.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#17

Post by disillusioned »

Joona wrote: post #3

Good. I absolutely hate videos that are so low volume that I have to turn Youtube up to 100%, and then adjust volume in Windows too, to hear anything. And then imagine finding one of the louder videos next. I've tried to give people advice on volume levels, but it feels like no one is willing to do it. Hopefully Twitch will do something similar soon, too.

With YouTube pushing auto-advancing to additional content, and heavily pushing playlists, this is even more important now.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#18

Post by Cthulhu_ »

vanderZwan wrote: post #15
Joona wrote: post #3

Good. I absolutely hate videos that are so low volume that I have to turn Youtube up to 100%, and then adjust volume in Windows too, to hear anything. And then imagine finding one of the louder videos next. I've tried to give people advice on volume levels, but it feels like no one is willing to do it. Hopefully Twitch will do something similar soon, too.

I think that is exactly the motivation: avoiding the random shifts in volume between videos. Pushing back against the loudness war was probably just a bonus. It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

Re the commercials, over here in NL they (finally!) introduced a law that prohibits that behaviour.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#19

Post by Joona »

vanderZwan wrote: post #15
Joona wrote: post #3

Good. I absolutely hate videos that are so low volume that I have to turn Youtube up to 100%, and then adjust volume in Windows too, to hear anything. And then imagine finding one of the louder videos next. I've tried to give people advice on volume levels, but it feels like no one is willing to do it. Hopefully Twitch will do something similar soon, too.

I think that is exactly the motivation: avoiding the random shifts in volume between videos. Pushing back against the loudness war was probably just a bonus. It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

Definitely. It allows people to discover more videos without creating the annoyance of having to change volume for every video.

Re: YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

#20

Post by SixSigma »

vanderZwan wrote: post #15
Joona wrote: post #3

Good. I absolutely hate videos that are so low volume that I have to turn Youtube up to 100%, and then adjust volume in Windows too, to hear anything. And then imagine finding one of the louder videos next. I've tried to give people advice on volume levels, but it feels like no one is willing to do it. Hopefully Twitch will do something similar soon, too.

I think that is exactly the motivation: avoiding the random shifts in volume between videos. Pushing back against the loudness war was probably just a bonus. It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

While it has a degree of intent, it is also because music is louder than dialogue.
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