Youtube is degrading audio after upload, and this will affect the Demoscene

[rutra80]

Originally Posted by Photon

I've been on a music adventure recently, and this is how I've noticed noticed this. I judge it to be relatively recent, perhaps at the start of 2021.

Please compare [ Show youtube player ](degraded) to this. (30s in, lead)

Or [ Show youtube player ](degraded) to this. (22s in and 440s in, respectively. lead.)

It can be heard as an organ-with-vibrato-like (frequency destroyer) of leads.

It's obviously important that a capture is accurate, more so than something temporary like a vlog. I'm sure the authors have received no notification that their content is being presented at degraded quality after upload, and I'm sure the vloggers will be catered to if they're big enough.

The change is very likely to affect video also, so if you've uploaded videos I would recommend to check them and file a complaint if you find faults.

@Photon: regarding your thread on Pouet, which increasingly becomes a society of mutual adoration for few individuals, let me answer here because I'm banned there.

Degraded links you provided seem to be mono(ish), while the nicer ones are properly stereo.

Currently, YT is using Opus as audio codec, at quite high bitrate, so there should be practically no audible differences.
Some time ago it was using other codecs, which especially at lower quality settings could be audibly worse, even downmixed to mono.
Perhaps degraded videos are from the era of those worse codecs, even if currently they got transcoded to Opus (and transcoding itself can introduce artifacts too).

YT surely isn't the best place for archival purposes, for many reasons (including political cancel culture).

[dreadnought]

Never thought people actually take youtube seriously as a proper archival place.

[coldacid]

dreadnought: Never underestimate humanity's capability to be worse than you ever believed.

[Rotareneg]

Nobody would have uploaded videos that sounded like that.

BAHAHAAAHAhahaah..... *gasp* BAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHH...

[pandy71]

YT always re-compress uploaded video (as such there is no sense in doing UHQ and time consuming compression in uploaded videos) - to deal with YT internal compression profiles it is recommended to up-sample video resolution even to 4k this is usually best way to force YT to allocate more bit-rate for video and for audio.