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

https://www.audiomisc.co.uk/YouTube/SpotTheDifference.html

by fhinson • 1 year ago

116 102 1 year ago

audiomisc.co.uk

Youtube probably have stats on viewer-happyness vs bitrate.

I would take a guess that a higher bitrate = longer loading times, and viewers care far more about an extra few second of buffering than they care about audio quality, especially when they don't have the original to compare to.

echoangle• 1 year ago

Couldn’t you do adaptive Bitrate and start streaming low-bitrate for a few seconds and then switch to higher quality once the video is already playing?

mungoman2• 1 year ago

Yes it's very possible to do this. Without seeking support it's trivial, just instruct the encoder to encode with a low bitrate for a few seconds and then increase it.

To support seeking you could encode a low bitrate stream, and a high quality stream, and then a number of ramps between these. So when you seek you start with the low bitrate stream and then after a few time units go on the ramp to the high quality stream.

KeplerBoy• 1 year ago

pretty sure they already do this.

supertrope2• 1 year ago

YouTube’s most common audio codecs Opus and AAC use variable bitrate (VBR) by default.

deathanatos• 1 year ago

While nothing that's been said here is inherently wrong per se, a sample YT page load is ~5s to DOMContentLoaded, and without counting the video content, transfers ~7 MiB worth of requests & ~95 requests for me, and visually, the entire page feels like it loads twice. (I thought it was redirecting, but the inspector says nope, that's a single page load.)

… while yeah… a lower bitrate upfront might lower the required bandwidth and thus, latency, to get enough of a buffer to start playback … all the bloat on the page would be a better first port of call.

jorvi4• 1 year ago

The audio data is miniscule compared to the video data, and the size of it is tied to the video quality level. And everything is streamed in chunks. It'd only amount to milliseconds of extra buffering.

cogman102• 1 year ago

Not as insignificant as you might imagine, especially if you are talking about surround sound audio.

With newer codecs, doing 4k with 2Mb/s isn't unheard of.

For audio, on the other hand, 32 or 64kbps per channel isn't unheard of.

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

This kind of analysis is interesting but must be considered rapidly outdated since we won't know what's changing behind the scenes at YouTube. Have they ever revealed whether their VCU handles the audio?

cf100clunk• 1 year ago

From 2022, so a similar analysis today would be revealing if substantial differences were seen/heard.

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

Sure. I think it's hard to control for every relevant factor though. We won't really know what stream they choose to serve under given circumstances to various clients, for example.

supertrope2• 1 year ago

Video takes up almost all of the bitrate/CPU time/ASIC budget, audio is a rounding error.

Server CPUs can encode audio at hundreds of times faster than realtime so there’s no need for hardware acceleration. Back in the iPod era DSPs were used to decode MP3/AAC but now only the most CPU or battery constrained devices like AirPods need hardware acceleration.

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

Do you have information on this or are you just supposing? The VCU accelerator is supposedly 100x faster than software for VP9 and they have up to 20 accelerators per host. At those ratios it's not clear that a machine would be able to keep up with the audio processing, or that it would be easy to manage the division of labor between accelerators and host CPUs. Also there definitely are broadcast transcoders on the market that do the audio in hardware.

lazka• 1 year ago

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.

mrob3• 1 year ago

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 of auditory masking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UZnMsm9o8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0_Kaj7cPk

The only fair way to evaluate lossy codecs is with double blind listening tests.

Arech• 1 year ago

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.

concerndc1tizen• 1 year ago

I wonder how many people there are, that don't have these weaknesses.

And who are therefore forced to hear terrible audio because the compression method only considers the majority.

baal80spam• 1 year ago

I always thought that YT audio was pretty bad.

nexus7556• 1 year ago

(2022)

xipix3• 1 year ago

Nice analysis, for 1x playback speed. If you're playing back at a different speed, for example, for music practice, YouTube audio is awful.

Why doesn't this huge AV platform use a better audio time stretch algorithm?

ajsnigrutin• 1 year ago

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.

xipix3• 1 year ago

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.

dylan6043• 1 year ago

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

Retric• 1 year ago

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.

perching_aix3• 1 year ago

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.

phonon2• 1 year ago

I think time stretching is done natively by your browser, not by Youtube at all. I use https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed on sites...allows any media to be stretched. Did you try another browser?

xipix3• 1 year ago

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...

bigtones• 1 year ago

Its the browser that does this on the client, not YouTube on the server.

jurmous• 1 year ago

I have YouTube premium and I have access to experimental features and coincidentally they offer one feature called audio in high quality. So they are working on improving it.

Description:

High-Quality Audio

Available until February 22

With high-quality audio, you can listen to music on YouTube in the best audio quality.

How it works: Watch an eligible music video on YouTube and enjoy the benefits of higher-quality audio.

Only available on iOS and Android.

nemomarx• 1 year ago

why only on mobile? very curious

guyzero• 1 year ago

likely end-to-end drm

togetheragainor• 1 year ago

For music listening, the YouTube Music app has settings for higher audio quality under "Settings > Playback".

According to their documentation, this is "Upper bound of 256kbps AAC & OPUS": https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9076559?hl=en...

EDIT: FWIW, I'm a Premium member. I'm not sure if this is a standard feature.

_DeadFred_2• 1 year ago

I wonder if I upload a video to standard Youtube and tag it 'music' so it's shows up over on Youtube Music does it get a better audio quality than the video encode gets?

anamexis• 1 year ago

I don't think you need to tag it as music. You can listen to any Youtube video in the Youtube Music app.

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

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 issued as the original engineer progressively loses his hearing?

ricardobeat2• 1 year ago

One of the advantages of Apple Music’s digital masters. They require no clipping which alone vastly improves a majority of albums.

snailmailman• 1 year ago

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-search and find the original, adding it back to my library.

A few songs just have new outros/intros. One song in my library now has an additional several seconds of silence on the end. One has a new longer intro that I think is really from the music video version of the song.

As convenient as these music services are, I hate that my library changes beneath me without my control. There are dozens of songs just straight up missing from my Spotify library now. And a small handful that have changed audio. These are almost always in indie songs, and Spotify just hides deleted songs by default in the UI so most users don’t notice.

qingcharles2• 1 year ago

I started this process for all the major labels in 1999. For the five years I was involved it was just "here's the CD, do your best, we don't have easy access to anything better than this. good luck." We ripped to WAV so we could re-encode as each new tech came out.

TonyTrapp2• 1 year ago

This affects all digital stores. Many labels appear to have lost their uncompressed masters, especially for stuff that was released on the internet in the early 2000s. I regularly catch them pants down when trying to buy something through digital music stores as lossless and I receive a FLAC file that shows clear signs of MP3 compression. It usually results in a refund from the store in question. For this reason I'm buying less and less through those stores, and try to hunt down cheap used CD copies instead, if at all possible.

RockRobotRock• 1 year ago

Wondering if yt-dlp picks up the higher codec formats too.

TonyTrapp2• 1 year ago

You can easily verify that: yt-dlp -F link-to-youtube-video

-F (uppercase!) lists all available audio and video formats to download.

out_of_protocol4• 1 year ago

Regular user can get up to YT-251, which is described in article, ~135kbps opus (i think target is higher, 160 kbps or so). But bitrate itself is good enough - on good headphones I can't distinguish flac vs opus-110kbps, except very rare killer samples. And YouTube audio clearly lacks detail despite having higher bitrate. So, probably, 256 kbps would not help much

_DeadFred_2• 1 year ago

Anyone uploading audio different platforms might find Streamliner useful (I'm nowhere near the point where details on that level matter). https://adptraudio.com/product/streamliner/

It's wild how many details sound people have to keep track of. I know when I upload to Youtube things get smoothed noticeably compared to say Soundcloud. Probably because I've mastered over their -14 LUFS requirement.

I wonder how much of the modern 'everyone needs to use closed captioning watching TV now' comes from the streaming services Codecs and other decisions and not just the A/V sound peoples' decisions. Do movies sound people now need to listen through on something like Streamliner above for every decision?

strogonoff2• 1 year ago

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 wider dynamic range of sound, as well as many more cues and context compared to a linear film (plus the ability to ask someone to repeat). This clashes with screenwriters having to[0] put crucial information in the dialogue, the rule of only saying something once, and other writing and production practices (which also exist for a reason). Realistic dialogue that is easy to grok requires cooperation from many sides.

That said, technical aspects matter, recording practices, mastering for loudness with little dynamic range (so that compressed voice blends with foley and the rest), and indeed encoding can definitely affect the ease of understanding human speech. Speaking of encoding… I couldn’t find it on the site, is Streamliner a one-time purchase?

[0] Well, not every film has to (Upstream Color comes to mind, as an example of a film with relatively little plot-advancing dialogue), but it seems that the majority of productions rely on dialogue and it isn’t going away.

qingcharles2• 1 year ago

Here's a really good article that proposes most of the reasons:

https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...

quesomaster9000• 1 year ago

With SoundCloud I've found you have to pay for the 'Plus+++' subscription or whatever it is to not get audio with the higher frequencies absolutely butchered, unless you follow a very specific upload process that bypasses their conversion.

Upload 320kbit encoded MP3? Sounds great.

Upload a high-khz WAV? It gets butchered, the top-end turns to glittery noise.

Maybe others have different experiences, but honestly it felt like I'd been duped when paying for the subscription but still got trash quality audio, only to have to pay more.

krick• 1 year ago

Why would it be 6.5 ms late? It's not much, but way larger than I'd expect. I never knew encoding might shift the audio track.

evo2• 1 year ago

I imagine the lossy encoding process could use a bunch of stacked filters to cut away imperceptible frequencies, but filters in the general case are implemented by summing delayed copies of the input and can smear the output in the phase domain. (There’s a branch of filters that avoid this but require computing the introduced delay and shifting the output to compensate.)

It’s a noticeable problem in audio production if e.g. a filtered kick drum goes out of phase and sucks amplitude when mixed with the original.

DevinShah• 1 year ago

Is it possible to run the recorded input through the filters twice, doing the second pass in reverse to cancel out the phase shift?

xiphmont2• 1 year ago

Short answer is 'bugs', possibly even in the reviewer's own software. Opus (and I would fully expect AAC-LC) preserves time alignment. Something unknown, somewhere unknown, in an unknown part of the unknown software chain caused an unknown shift, and it's not necessarily by an integer number of samples. You can't use this 'enh, whatever, good enough' approach and expect to do meaningful null analysis, even if you're using it inappropriately.

In all seriousness, every aspect of this comparison is somewhere between deeply flawed and invalid. No point dwelling on just one part.

atoav• 1 year ago

A good way of hearing the gras grow is a null test.

Take unprocessed audio and process it. Then take both the processed and unprocessed audio and add them to your audio software (e.g. Audacity). Now flip the polarity of one of the audio signals.

This allows you to listen to the difference between the two signals and if there is nothing there, guess what, they are the same or the differences are so small that theg are inaudible.

This is a great way to anger people with expensive hifi gold cables, because what is true in the digital also works in the analog.

You only need to make sure both ajdio signals are at the same level (by minimizing the level of the difference).

xiphmont2• 1 year ago

Oh, look a new analysis of YouTube quality that, surely, has learned something from all the past discussions...

[reads]

...Jesus H. F. Christ....

Every generation thinks they discover sex and audio analysis for the first time.

[And don't call me Shirley]

eqvinox• 1 year ago

Including 44.1kHz in the analysis is ignorant of the fact that most consumer audio equipment made in the past decade or two cannot switch its clock source and physical playback sample rate to that anymore. It's all 48kHz (or multiples of that, for snake oil) these days, starting with when Intel cemented HDA on a 24MHz clock. Playing back anything 44.1kHz just gets resampled at some point before hitting the DAC, in most cases in software.

nayuki2• 1 year ago

It's all 48kHz (or multiples of that, for snake oil)

Oversampling can be a useful internal detail for ADCs and DACs. For example, if the digital audio stream is mathematically converted to 96 kHz with a high-quality FIR low-pass filter and then fed to a DAC, then the analog low-pass filter can have a much shallower roll-off and be more easily designed. Same goes for ADCs, where the analog filter can be simple and gentle, then digitized at 96 kHz, then downsampled digital to 48 kHz with high-quality but more computationally intensive filters. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversampling , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-sigma_modulation , etc.)

But yes, listening to or distributing audio at anything over 48 kHz is a complete waste of resources. Monty@Xiph.Org explained very well in: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

naltroc2• 1 year ago

When I use an FFT to view the spectrogram on YouTube music videos, it is very obvious that YouTube applies a lowpass filter at 16kHz on all videos (true since 2023 at least).

While this does retain the majority of useful information, it explains why the youtube version of your song feels just a little more 'lifeless' than the high quality version you have elsewhere.

The original recording contains high frequency detail that got lost. Your human body uses that high frequency detail to orient itself in space with respect to sound sources (like reverb, reflections, or ambient sounds).

It is interesting from a data storage point of view because this could result in massive savings. Consider audio is recorded at 44.1khz or 48kHz but is actually stored at 32kHz. They have effectively saved 25% in audio file storage at marginal customer experience.

nayuki2• 1 year ago

it explains why the youtube version of your song feels just a little more 'lifeless' than the high quality version you have elsewhere

Having hearing sensitivity over 16 kHz is unusual. If you're under 15 years old and kept your ears pristine by not listening to loud noises, you might be able to hear it. Older people are out of luck.

Moreover, even if you can hear above 16 kHz in loud pure tones, there is so little content in real audio/music above 16 kHz that it makes no practical difference.

massive savings ... effectively saved 25%

Not really. Going from a 48 kHz sampling rate to 32 kHz is indeed 2/3× the size for uncompressed PCM audio. But for lossily compressed audio? Not remotely the same. Even in old codecs like MP3, high frequency bands have heavy quantizers applied and use far fewer bits per hertz than low frequency bands. Analogously, look at how JPEG and MPEG have huge quantizers for high spatial frequencies (i.e. small details) and small quantizers for broad, large visual features.

naltroc2• 1 year ago

It is true that your ears do not perceive the higher frequencies in the same way (through pitch detection). However, if you put on a headset and apply only frequencies above 16kHz, you will distinctly notice a change in the pressure in your headset's ear cups.

Good point about the savings. I was using uncompressed format as the reference, but it is indeed unlikely that YouTube serves out lossless audio.

I also should have used the word "delivery" instead of data storage. Those are two separate problems: where the original asset is stored (and how, if they don't store raw originals), and also how the asset is delivered over the web.

danadam2• 1 year ago

When I use an FFT to view the spectrogram on YouTube music videos, it is very obvious that YouTube applies a lowpass filter at 16kHz on all videos (true since 2023 at least).

Maybe with a browser that doesn't support Opus and gets AAC instead (Safari?). With Firefox or Chromium on Linux I get up to 20 kHz, which by design is the upper limit in Opus codec.

xyst• 1 year ago

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 competition. Just shove ads down users throats and sell of their usage data.

edflsafoiewq• 1 year ago

Lossy codecs at 120-190k in 2022 are probably transparent.

out_of_protocol4• 1 year ago

Opus _IS_ transparent at 128 kbps, big IF - encoded properly. YouTube does some weird shit instead of just reencoding

udev4096• 1 year ago

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

ZoomZoomZoom2• 1 year ago

I got better audio quality ripping songs from limewire or Napster in the 2000s.

Nah, you didn't, at least not reliably. Half of that were recodes and upcodes that used Blade, FhG or Xing.

Only with torrent technology and community-driven trackers we got reliable distribution that surpassed the official non-physical channels.

ksec• 1 year ago

I swear within the last 24 months most of the new Youtube video I saw had 256kbps AAC-LC audio in it. I thought that was generous of them to up the quality of audio. ( Along with 4Mbps 1080p50 AVC Video Files which is also quite high in quality )

Now I just check on YouTube again and they are now back to 128 / 130 Kbps for AAC-LC.

bombela• 1 year ago

I noticed the same thing.

hulitu• 1 year ago

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

Good. YouTube audio quality is crap. Plain and simple. 320 bps MP3 sounds better than anything Youtube offers. And 320 bps MP3 is not even "quality".

ncprog59• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StUxyyISJBA

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

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