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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)."
The high quality version of the audio will have the 19 (or up to 22.1) kHz sine wave you choose to use in your video upload. So this is a trade-off of quality (high-quality = eek!) versus lack of unwanted range compression (low-quality = listenable, for lack of a better word).
FWIW, I can hear 19 kHz waves. So this trade-off affects me.
It looks to me like Google have done this on purpose to stop people uploading high quality audio with a still image. A lot of the music I've been listening too recently has been from youtube, I'm sure I'm not the only one...