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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)

#71

Post by exodust »

xipix wrote: post #28
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be fair, for anything music related, you'll be doing 1x speed... higher than that is usually speech only, where it doesn't matter as much.

If you're learning guitar, drums, piano, trumpet, etc, you'll want to start playing along at about 75% speed then work up until you can play 110% faster than you need to. YouTube's built in audio time stretch makes this a painful exercise.

What's the benefit of learning to play faster than you need to? I understand wanting to play slower, but why faster?

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

#72

Post by strogonoff »

qingcharles wrote: post #67
strogonoff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Here's a really good article that proposes most of the reasons: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...

For so many words I do not think it says something really new besides that it is art style, “realistic dialogue” in writing/direction, recording, mixing, mastering, and/or encoding.

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

#73

Post by butterknife »

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.

Apple Digital Masters indeed recommends no clipping. But the program is based on Apple interviewing the process that to-be-certified mastering engineers use. There is a way where you can pass the interview, get certified and then decide that clipping sounds better/louder/whatever and the file will still get the ADM stamp.

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

#74

Post by bmacho »

PeeMcGee wrote: post #63
xipix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> audio processing can be done in JS/WASM If there's reason to believe this is a useful way to handle time stretching, then there's reason to believe the same browser could do it natively just fine.

There is no reason to believe that browsers do it just fine if you have evidence for the contrary.

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

#75

Post by bmacho »

Retric wrote: post #31
dylan604 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Changing playback speed is a heavily used feature. They’ve also refined it several times, recently adding 0.05 speed increments not just 0.25.

Keyboard commands still make it jump in 0.25 steps.

Does anyone know a youtube-frontend that lets me change the playback speed in smaller steps using keyboard?

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

#76

Post by Arech »

mrob wrote: post #34
lazka wrote: post #8

See "Why not use graphs / frequency analysis to compare codecs?" https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=FAQ#:~:text=Why%... "I decided that analysis should focus on the higher, more conventional rates – 48k and 44k1" - opus is always 48khz, so that doesn't mean much.

This. Your ears are not an oscilloscope. Lossy audio codecs are designed to exploit two major weaknesses in human hearing: 1. Poor sensitivity in bass and treble. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour 2. Limited ability to hear multiple sounds simultaneously, or almost simultaneously. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking Bernhard Seeber has some videos on Youtube with demonstrations…

The problem with these weaknesses is that they are different in each human being. For me listening an mp3 is like a sanding an ear, while some don't even hear the difference between it and a live performance.

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

#77

Post by Semaphor »

snailmailman wrote: post #65
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…

This is unfortunately the case on other platforms like Spotify too. :( Due to what I assume are music licensing oddities, one song in my Spotify now has an entirely different singer. It was taken down for a while, then later reuploaded as a new recording with new vocals. I’ve also seen copies of my songs changing to remix/cover versions, presumably due to metadata adjustments by the artists. Although usually I can re…

One of my favorite albums of the last year [0] has had its 5 tracks split into 3 parts each on streaming platforms. It’s kinda weird, but I assume it’s because of the way streaming services pay per track and not per second played.

[0]: https://open.spotify.com/album/1xJ3AfTOdsBltWGFDubJZ9

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

#78

Post by mrob »

Arech wrote: post #76
mrob wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Your ears are not an oscilloscope. Lossy audio codecs are designed to exploit two major weaknesses in human hearing: 1. Poor sensitivity in bass and treble. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour 2. Limited ability to hear multiple sounds simultaneously, or almost simultaneously. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking Bernhard Seeber has some videos on Youtube with demonstrations…

The problem with these weaknesses is that they are different in each human being. For me listening an mp3 is like a sanding an ear, while some don't even hear the difference between it and a live performance.

Can you ABX it?

https://abx.digitalfeed.net/lame.320.html

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

#79

Post by udev4096 »

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…

Most people don't have a standard of listening to higher audio quality and youtube has taken advantage of it. Those who do, naturally self host. Plus, if they started serving FLAC, it would be bandwidth intensive

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

#80

Post by perching_aix »

dylan604 wrote: post #62
perching_aix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The niche was for the people using YT to learn to play a song. You’re now applying to something else, so that’s a bit of goal post moving. Also, your use of need is odd as well, and seem to have convinced yourself that the world is wrong and only you’re right. If it needed, the creators would have made it that way

> Also, your use of need is odd as well, and seem to have convinced yourself that the world is wrong and only you’re right. If it needed, the creators would have made it that way

It's called having personal experiences and an opinion. You should try them sometime. It's almost as if appropriate tempo was in the "eye" of the "viewer", and so I was very clearly not suggesting my needs and essentials are universal objective truths in the first place. Getting extremely tired of having to insert "I think", "I believe", "in my opinion" to signal subjectivity in what - I think - are ostensibly subjective contexts, just so that I can avoid subsequent bikeshedding like this.

> You’re now applying to something else, so that’s a bit of goal post moving.

This will be crazy I know, but instead of this delightfully malice-assuming explanation, I simply missed the words where they said "music practice". Didn't help that "timestretch for music practice" is not a feature of YouTube, only timestretch is (as part of the playback rate adjustment feature), so when you were (according to my personal impression of the wording of your previous comment) generally addressing the feature, I replied in kind.

If I was being extra prickly, I'd accuse you of intentionally writing in a way so that you could accuse me of strawmanning you later (goalpost moving is a very loose fit here) for an easy dunk, but of course as someone who reaches for fallacies immediately, you wouldn't do that, right?

This is what distrust sown between people, as well as just plain not being able to know your discussion partner looks like. It's been increasingly frustrating me, and it looks like it's having an effect on you too.

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