Sneaking Past Heavy-Handed Audio Compression on YouTube

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)."

Comments

and who came up with it?

[X0563511]

Who's the mentally... challenged... individual who decided that applying such compression in the first place was a good idea, and then proceeded to implement or accept such a shitty implementation?

Re:and who came up with it?

[larry bagina]

youtube is a huge money sink. They probably can't afford to hire people that have experience in audio compression, test different algorithms, etc. As to why... video and sound quality varies a lot, so they probably are trying to make everything more equal, so the viewer doesn't need to adjust their volume for every video.

Re:and who came up with it?

[mdmkolbe]

I don't think YouTube is trying to run a loudness war, but rather trying to fix up a lot of amateurish recordings that are uploaded with bad audio. I can't tell you how many recordings on the net are either way to quiet (e.g. I can't hear speech even at max volume) or too loud and that change in mid-video (e.g. person walks away from or closer to mic). Despite their good intentions, though, it seems to have fallen prey to the "Clippy" effect.

What YouTube needs to do is have a little check-box on uploads that indicates whether to apply the auto-balance. And in case an uploader asks for no auto-balance when they really shouldn't (e.g. they think they know but don't) there should be a side link to listen to the auto-balanced version.

Re:and who came up with it?

[daem0n1x]

I guess they are trying to compensate for the huge differences between recording quality in the videos people submit. Some are loud enough, others are very low and you have to turn the level way up to understand what people are saying.
They could simply normalise the level, but if you have a speech with very low level and the guy drops the microphone in the middle, that one peak is so loud that will make the normalisation process useless.
But compression is such a complex and subjective issue that it should be performed by hand. I guess they have an automated process for that, and it doesn't have any intelligence, just steamrolls all the audio it finds, whether it's speech, music, or anything else.

Re:and who came up with it?

[X0563511]

They need to allow a means of bypassing the compression, then.

Re:and who came up with it?

[anotherone]

The typical youtube uploader can't even manage to tag their videos properly. Giving them MORE options is just dangerous.

Re:and who came up with it?

[X0563511]

Then hide the options. You don't protect the idiot by rubber-coating all the corners in the room, you protect them by putting the knives out of reach.

Wouldn't it be easier

[phantomfive]

Wouldn't it be easier to set your gate correctly? Cut out the background sounds BEFORE submitting to youtube; do proper editing and then it doesn't matter so much what they do. Here, in my opinion, is a good site for all such information.

Re:Just sneak past the entire recompression proces

[4D6963]

Ha... however considered that .flv video is H263 (or is it H264 now?) I guess you could find a program that would change the container to an AVI-compatible one and thus avoid recompressing?

Recording vs Processing

[rueger]

Although I tend to think that Dan East summed it up best, I feel the need to point out that 95% of bad YouTube audio is the result of lousy recording quality, not subsequent processing.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

The mics and electronics on most consumer camcorders (or that most people use with their Macs and PCs) are just plain crappy, and shouldn't be relied on for anything that you hope to distribute. And of course, some actual audio recording skills help too.

Re:Recording vs Processing

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh yeah, hold on, let me go spend a couple hundred dollars on microphones for my camcorder. Great idea. As a matter of fact, why don't I go ahead and upgrade that all-in-1 camcorder for a pro kit, take some filmmaking classes, just so I can put videos of my sister's wedding on Youtube. Great idea there, hoss.