Sneaking Past Heavy-Handed Audio Compression on YouTube

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 27, 2008 @07:22AM from the sine-language-for-the-hearing dept.

niceone writes "Recently YouTube seems to have started applying extreme compression to the audio of uploaded clips. This is the type of compressions used by radio stations to make everything louder, but in this case applied extremely badly. In quiet passages, breathing and shuffling become overpoweringly loud. A gently plucked guitar chord becomes a distorted thud. Listen to an example here. And here's what it could sound like — still not perfect, but a whole lot better. The fixed version is thanks to a workaround proposed by Sopranoguitar — the idea is to turn down the audio and mix in a high frequency sine wave (I used 19kHz). The sine wave fools YouTube's compressor into thinking that the file is at a uniform level (and does not need the volume changing at all) but is filtered out by the encoding process (so, no need to worry about deafening any dogs)."

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What happend to do no evil? by TheNetAvenger · 2008-07-27 11:08 · Score: 0, Flamebait

What happend to do no evil?
Oh, right, it doesn't apply if it allows them to save money...
Meet Google, the next Microsoft, this time a scary version with enough information on all people to keep them in jail or quiet. Love the data mining! Go GMail, Go Search, Go Ad clicks, Go Firefox reporting back...
Yeah Google!