Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels (Read 4094 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

As I'm (somehow) content with using the free version for not so serious desktop browser listening now and then (Adblocker takes care of the ads) I wonder if paying users also come across such LQ audio (if not, as I suspect the very same tracks) as frequently as I do, like the absurd low volume in the second track of Pearl Jam's Gigaton album or that inherent chirping and ringing of badly-encoded lossy formats in Van Halen's 5150, for instance.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #1 –
As far as I can tell, YouTube Music is just a frontend for all videos on YouTube that contain music. Looking at a YouTube Music URL in the browser, I see this format:

music.youtube.com/watch?v=<video ID>&list=<playlist ID>

If you open another browser tab, you can go directly to the video that YouTube Music is using:

youtube.com/watch?v=<video ID>

to see where it came from using the normal YouTube web interface. If the original uploader used poor quality, then it'll be poor quality on YouTube Music, too. YouTube Music does not have its own database of music; it's just a separate UI for organising existing videos.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #2 –
YT music is opus 128k and also fallback AAC.  Music videos are different though.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #3 –
There are some serious bugs with youtube's music. It's full of channel and artist name conflicts, for instance all of Billy Cobham's stuff is listed under someone called "StardollUmoFenty1"

Code: [Select]
https://www.youtube.com/user/StardollUmoFenty1/playlists

I routinely see official music uploads on some random person's personal channel. Other times they are completely orphaned and don't seem to belong to any channel, but you can still find them with the right search.

edit: how do I not embed a yt video and just a normal link?

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #4 –
Usually track info is accurate in the description when provided by a publisher.

In this case, Umo Fenty is an official artist channel carrying videos for Billy Cobham, Dennis Chambers, others, provided directly from publishers like Rhino Atlantic. High quality.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #5 –
I can confirm that YouTube Music and YouTube are the exact same thing only with different interfaces.

I've not noticed any particular issues with quality unless a particular song was uploaded by a fan using a bad source.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #6 –
Thanks for that folks. It somehow confirms what I'd already suspected: YT Music is a shambles!

Though I'm a happy Google Drive subscriber, they surely won't see the colour of my money for that.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #7 –
Quote from: ajp9 on
Usually track info is accurate in the description when provided by a publisher.

In this case, Umo Fenty is an official artist channel carrying videos for Billy Cobham, Dennis Chambers, others, provided directly from publishers like Rhino Atlantic. High quality.
It's not supposed to be like that. It's supposed to be "Billy Cobham - Topic". Some part of the automated process has gone wrong.

Here's another one, British funk band Down To The Bone:
Code: [Select]
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-TWoQR6Bpk0-w24cTgeBTA/playlists
It's some gamer's channel with his live streams. Poor Jazper probably wondering what's going on.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #8 –
Quote from: includemeout on
Thanks for that folks. It somehow confirms what I'd already suspected: YT Music is a shambles!

Though I'm a happy Google Drive subscriber, they surely won't see the colour of my money for that.

YouTube encodes in Opus at approximately 160Kbps which is perfectly fine for 99.99% of people out there. I have yet to find a song which is "badly" encoded. Opus at 160Kbps is as good or even better than Lame MP3 at 320Kbps (I'm not joking) which means it's transparent for absolute most people.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #9 –
Remember that the 160k Opus is a lossy transcode, though. The audio quality is limited by whatever codec and bitrate the original uploader used, and then Google will transcode to Opus and AAC from that, even if the original audio was already Opus or AAC.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Aleron Ives on
Remember that the 160k Opus is a lossy transcode, though. The audio quality is limited by whatever codec and bitrate the original uploader used, and then Google will transcode to Opus and AAC from that, even if the original audio was already Opus or AAC.

I've tested literally a hundred tracks from youtube music - judging from their spectrum all of them were uploaded as CDDA/PCM audio.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #11 –
AAC, Opus, and even MP3 are capable of operating without a lowpass filter, so having full spectrum content doesn't really prove anything.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Aleron Ives on
AAC, Opus, and even MP3 are capable of operating without a lowpass filter, so having full spectrum content doesn't really prove anything.

I trust my years. You may continue to criticize youtube's encoding methods without providing any solid arguments.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #13 –
Quote from: birdie on
judging from their spectrum all of them were uploaded as CDDA/PCM audio.
Quote from: birdie on
I trust my years.
Last I checked, people look at spectrum analysers with their eyes, not their ears.

Anyway, I didn't say that YouTube Music always had bad sound quality. I said it was limited by the quality used by the original uploader, which is true. It's a good idea to avoid lossy transcoding, but if you can't hear the difference, then it doesn't really matter in practice.

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #14 –
Quote from: birdie on
I've tested literally a hundred tracks from youtube music - judging from their spectrum all of them were uploaded as CDDA/PCM audio.

And I can give you another hundred tracks that are obvious MP3 re-encodes where you can clearly see 16 kHz cut-off...
YouTube is using material that is provided to them by publishers/labels. Not really YouTube's fault.
gold plated toslink fan

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #15 –
Quote from: birdie on
I've not noticed any particular issues with quality unless a particular song was uploaded by a fan using a bad source.
From my side, it's the latter (inconsistency) more than the earlier (SQ) that led me to bring this up in the first place.

edit: typo
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #16 –
I listen to a lot of youtube music and even though I know it's low SQ and low res it doesn't matter I still enjoy a good song no matter what the SQ. In fact, for me, SQ is not related to my enjoyment of music. The idea of "critical listening" seems silly to me. I don't listen to equipment I listen to music. I enjoy a good song in my car ( with it's mediocre car stereo) just as much as in my house. This is why I find equipment reviews in stereophile and TAS so odd. The analytical descriptions of the sound of a DAC or an amp , for me, make no sense. Is a great movie more or less great depending on the picture quality of the TV you're watching it on? Not for me. Completely unrelated. In fact years ago when I was an audiophile I found that obsessing about sq was ruining my enjoyment of music.






OPPO 203 UDP/ Yammy Aventage AVR (used as a pre)/Schiit Vidar amp/ Magnepan LRS speakers
 

Re: Youtube Music's crappy AQ and inconsistent levels

Reply #17 –
"In the US, Deezer currently has 90 million licensed tracks in its library, with over 30,000 radio channels, 100 million playlists [...] Deezer HiFi offers 36 million tracks of 16-Bit/44.1 kHz of FLAC"

https://www.deezer.com/en/offers/hifi


3 months free
https://www.deezer.com/en/offers/premium