if time is money then i'm out of time


hkr
@hkr

not cause of fake moral or commerce reasons, no no. Pirate that shit all you want.

The reason you shouldn't download music off youtube is because most youtube uploads are done by people uploading lossy encoded mp3s, which youtube then takes and also lossy encodes them, creating the dreaded "double lossy" encode which does have a noticeable effect on music quality.

On top of that a lot of downloaders also recompress the music in a lossy format.

Add onto generations of users doing this after originals get struck down and who knows how many generations of degradation you'll have.

A screenshot of the program Spek, a spectrum analyzer for audio, showing heavy shelving at 15khz, a telltale sign of lossy encoding

The above photo is a spectrum analysis of a random track downloaded off of youtube and recompressed to mp3. Notice those "shelves? That's the telltale sign of a file constantly being reencoded in a lossy format.

A screenshot of the program Spek, a spectrum analyzer for audio, showing what a losslessly encoded track should look like with natural peaks around 22khz

This is what a losslessly encoded track looks like (please ignore its a different song, I realized after I snipped the initial image that my lossless copy was done at 24/192, which would not have illustrated what I was talking about). Notice the distinct lack of shelving. Higher frequencies are not cut off artificially.

I'm not saying you need to have pristine vinyl rips of every single piece of music you enjoy, but I am saying there is a noticeable degradation in quality when ripping music off youtube specifically.


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in reply to @hkr's post:

I really wish youtube wasn't the best source for obtaining like really obscure songs nobody has ever made a torrent of or never had a CD reissue. Music really is treated like something completely disposable by streaming companies and labels...

for some music there's literally no alternatives! for example my 60 hour playlist of dishonored ambient sounds (since those soundtracks are dynamically mixed inside the game and as such, an official ambience.wav doesn't exist)

DJs have been getting on other DJs' shit for years for this reason. Imagine hearing a terrible youtube rip on a club sound system, because the DJ wanted to have that rare track and not drop twenny quid on the record and rip it.

oh for sure — I don't advocate pirating the work of regular people who aren't publishing their work through huge conglomerates. but if someone wants to pirate something produced by Netflix instead of spending money that will go to, like, more Dave Chappelle specials, that's a morally correct thing to do.

and the risk of malware or getting in trouble is very wrapped up in it being perceived as too hard; I think a lot of people hear words like "VPN" and "torrent client" and assume it's an impossibly technical thing that they have no chance of understanding.

we should also take into account that a lot of computer stuff is being abstracted away & hidden for users nowadays. sure, we grew up in a time where you had to fuck around and find out, the typical 16 year olds of today can't even open a zip without guidance (i wish l were joking; a friend is in teaching and he gets so many kids who aren't aware how to extract a zip)

This, this, so much this.
It's also way easier to download multiple tracks with Soulseek than with a YouTube-MP3 downloader.
Although the audio quality and amount of metadata may differ, they will always be better than any MP3 converter. Best you can get with a converter is the video title and the channel name.

Came into the comments specifically to find and agree with this take. My first thought on checking out Soulseek a couple years ago was "oh wow, this is still a thing ppl are using? Thought this kinda p2p setup died out in the mid 2000s." My immediate second thought was "OH FUCK I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS OBSCURE REMIX FOR LITERALLY YEARS NOW"

OF COURSE it's something dug up during rhythm game community drama ffs

Thank you though, hopefully this little nugget of information will turn back up as a longform video in my RSS feed in the future.

This is only true if you use one of those "YouTube to MP3" sites instead of yt-dlp (or one of the many wrapper GUIs for it) or NewPipe. YouTube audio is 160kbps Opus — extremely high quality.

Given a lossless source (e.g. any official music upload) it's actually much better quality than you can get from almost anywhere else (except for true-lossless files, obviously). And Opus support gets better every day.

Opus is exclusively VBR; the actual bitrate varies depending on the actual audio content. In my library (with a LOT of albums sourced from YouTube) the bitrate varies from ~128k to ~160k iirc.

The format code for the max-quality Opus audio stream is 251. Regardless, even 128k as the bitrate target is still considered nearly-transparent; check the linked table.

EDIT: I checked the actual bitrates of 100 songs in my library known to be sourced from YouTube (all Genesis FM synthesis, highly variable style) and they vary from 120k to 220k. Opus encoders generally try to target an average bitrate, so by taking the average, we can guess that YouTube's encoding quality is 150k. The closest "quality notch" in the reference encoder is 160k. This is "only" 4 and a half hours of audio, so, take with a grain of salt.

I think y(ou)t(ube)-dl(p) only reports back the ABR of a given stream. Makes sense that they have a lot of variation, I think the stuff I look for tends to compress better.

Some day, someone will re-release the sansa clip+ with Opus support and my life will be complete.

I considered fixing the weird word above but have decided to keep it, in all of it's horror.

I vaguely recall testing this years ago and it was a battery drain. Naturally, the OF does not have gapless support and is thus useless.

I should have specified "hardware Opus support" or some kind of HW acceleration.

It is very cool, and I love it dearly. The only downside is I refuse to use any music devices that don't support it well.

A shame that it's still just that bit too buggy on ipods, I'd LOVE to have the click wheel and bigger screen but 4G, 5G, and Mini all gave me too many issues. :(

... I might fire one up and run "snow" until the battery drains out tonight.

correct idea, wrong interpretation

The problem with youtube is not necessarily that the source is lossy because if you for example download youtube music uploaded videos, which are the most music related videos, thats not really the case since they act like a streaming service effectively encoding the audio stream for youtube from the lossless source. Those would in general be the lesser evil IF and thats a big if, you dont reencode lossy audio they provide to u again.

Firstly ur "spectrum analysis" aint really a spectrum analysis, its just an audio spectrum. Well in any way its garbage since the comparison is just not fair? I mean any point ur trying to make here just gets blown out of proportion since u literally took a 112kbps cbr mp3 at 48khz to compare to a different song in flac thats only at 44.1khz instead of a real AAC or Opus audio from youtube. Since its a different song at a different samplerate and just way quieter then the other example file u pulled up this is not prooving anything other than "this lossy song is really quiet and hella lossy and this other lossless song is like lossless u know?" so im gonna give a better example:

Lossless 24bit 48.0kHz: Lossless 24bit 48.0kHz Youtube Opus VBR 160kbps~: Youtube Opus VBR 160kbps

I mean hate on youtube all u want, im on ur side but... thats just not a remotely realistic illustration of what ur trying to say.

Also generally speaking looking at a spectrogram can tell u if ur music is somewhat lossy 50% of the time. It works as long as you have a Lossy codec at a low bitrate. MP3 is by far the worst offender in its CBR settings because even at its "Insane" setting it just has a straight cutoff at 20.5 kHz literally specified in the encoding settings. But take for example Spotifys OGG Vorbis at a bitrate of 320kbps.

Ogg Vorbis 320kbps: Ogg Vorbis 320kbps

No straight cutoff to be found and without having a reference spectrogram of the lossless file you cant just spot it. There is other indicators but i dont want this to be even longer then it already is.

Also these "shelves" as u call em' are not really an indicator of it being constantly reencoded. These are just general signs that it is somewhat lossy. If we take for example MP3 CBR at a bitrate of 320kbps even after multiple encodings you wont see any "shelves" but more of a straight cutoff. Inspecting it in the spectrogram wont really show any further audio degradation it will be audible at some point tho.

And even if we take MP3 it doesnt have to be a straight cutoff or look boxy at the peaks. Take for example MP3 v0 which is the best VBR setting.

MP3 CBR 320kbps [the most common "HQ" mp3]: CBR 320kbps Straight cutoff with wierd peaks above 20.5kHz

MP3 v0 VBR 272kbps~: VBR 272kbps Lower bitrate, higher peaks, no blocks to be seen.

Even checking if parts of the audio exceed some part of the spectrogram wont really help you analyze anything as even professional masters of songs may not go to the top of the spectrogram.

Lossless 24bit 44.1kHz: Lossless 24bit 44.1kHz And now just for fun lets do a v0 MP3 encode MP3 VBR v0

I mean people could assume that the Lossless file may be lossy measured by it not completely peaking to 22.05. The other way around you could think the v0 was Lossless if you didnt have the reference of the Lossless Spectrogram.

I've seen people introducing noise to make the spectrogram appear blue in places where the lossy version was empty. Cant really go into details but he basically used those to authenticate some software he provided is legit with witch he then scammed people and even worse introduced tons of faked lossless versions of songs into the wild.

what im trying to say is dont overanalyze a spectrogram. Listen with your ears not ur eyes.

Also keeping anything over 24bit 96khz is a waste of harddrive space and even that is pushing it. The sweetspot in my opinion is 24 bit 48khz. With stereo audio that makes 24khz per ear and is somewhat at the end of whats audible in terms of high frequencies. [Use sox (Sound eXchange) to downsample as it produces the best results]

Another tip, avoid MQA as that is basically Lossy Audio in a Proprietary Codec sold to u as "Better than Lossless" since they cannot say it is Lossless anymore because it factually is not.