Update: image via Sonic State
Our friend Jexus, aka WC Olo Garb wrote in to let us know that YouTube has changed their encoding resulting in much lower quality audio. You can read about it on the Wired blog as well as this thread. Alternatives? Vimeo and Sonicstate TV, although the one thing YouTube does have is the community and exposure. You can see how many plays your videos get and you can see where they are coming from. I find it interesting to see how many hits a post here has generated for the video. I've had a number of people recognize the site because of this. Hopefully YouTube will correct the problem and others will build in the public tracking functionality of YouTube. What can you do? Not sure. Just be aware of it and chose your hosting accordingly. You can also chime in on the YouTube thread. If enough people speak out maybe they'll fix the problem. If you run a blog let your readers know.
The problem via Wired in a nutshell:
"Some YouTube users are mounting a growing revolt against the site's new audio scheme, which has degraded the sound quality of clips on the site by running them through an audio processor that wreaks havoc with songs' dynamic range (the variation between loud and soft), diminishing their sound quality.
This is not "compression" as in bit rate or file format, but in the audio engineer sense of the word: the smushing together of various volumes into a smaller dynamic range. This sort of compression doesn't affect slickly-produced, radio-ready music quite as much, since it's already so compressed, but it hurts any music that has been properly produced, and does more damage to nuanced recordings with lots of dynamic range."
Given that it tends to be commercially available music that's overcompressed already and original music that's recorded with a proper dynamic range, won't this scheme do precisely the opposite of what YouTube want - ie. hurt those uploading well-mastered original compositions to which they own the copyrights, whilst having little effect on those uploading album or MP3 rips? Am I missing something here...?
ReplyDeleteThat's a smart move in the right direction. Now if only they could figure out how to get the audio/video sync even farther apart.
ReplyDeleteAhh good, so I can still release my next album via youtube.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Google is trying to fit extra adverts in the bits that are saved.
ReplyDeleteYay for Google innovating!
Maybe they'll put subliminal codes in the codec to hype their stock even more.
Somewhere I heard that the homebrew solution was to mix a 19khz sine wave throughout the whole video and make it super loud. This makes the compressor think the entire file is already loud and at a completely steady volume so it doesn't do any compressing. And then the tone gets filtered out in the encoding so you're good. I admit it's a much bigger pain in the ass then before, but it's a novel way around it.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with adding a constant high-frequency tone is that the signal would still appear to have amplitude variations to a simple level detector. The high-frequency signal would have to "duck" (like Dolby HX!) when the main signal is louder.
ReplyDeleteI did it like that and it seems to have preserved all of the dynamic range. Here is a writeup I did:
http://slugbug.sound-club.org/youtube
The intention is not bad because the odd loud or quiet video is annoying, but I guess it would be more sensible to have audio simply normalized to a certain average level than this.
ReplyDelete