highs fucking up on soundcloud

[Still Young]

iv'e uploaded a tune to soundcloud and all the high-end fucks up mainly HATS and RIMSHOT
it sounds fine inside my daw and as an 320

heres the sc link:
https://soundcloud.com/l1ner/l1ner-amia ... ce/s-J4KIS
and heres mp3:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n9qfhb6oaqsmp ... ilence.mp3

is it a mixdown issue or is it sc thing?

[syrup]

it's a sc ting

[NinjaEdit]

Soundcloud converts to 128kb/s MP3 which may be causing the problem.

[Still Young]

another question i notice a peak at 0:57 in the sc waveform which i didnt see in SMEXOSCOPE o-o
i've looked on the smexoscope for hours and all looked perfect

[rockonin]

I upload my tracks to soundcloud using a .wav file format. Have you tried that?

[nowaysj]

I upload 24 bit wav's.

Sometimes I hear highs that are very heavily bit rate reduced, like they went to a variable bit rate, and the rate was really really low. Don't know what the deal is.

If you want really clean audio to demo your tracks. Get a website and host the audio yourself. Otherwise, figure out what sounds good on SC, and mix to that.

My sig track has a tun of really high highs. Sounds passable to me.

[wub]

Bear in mind that Soundcloud compresses the signal again when it converts it for upload. So if you've got heavy compression on the track you're uploading, and then it's getting compressed again, then that's two lots of compression that could do all sorts of funky weird shit (and not in the good sense) to the final audio.

If you've got compression on the master, for example, try taking it off prior to uploading and see if that makes a difference to how Soundcloud processes the track.

[nowaysj]

Has anyone ran any tests on uploads? Like just sat for an afternoon playing with dynamic range / frequency content, uploading and testing?

And to clarify wub, you're talking about dynamic range compression, not data compression?

[AxeD]

The lower sample rate makes for less accurate representation in high end (because the
wave lengths are obviously really short).

SC recommends uploading high quality files, but that technically means relying on their compression.

[Dub_Fiend]

As far as I was aware it was due to bitrate compression during the conversion process after upload... The reduction in bitrate means that frequency content on the lower and higher end of the spectrum is cut out to save the space that's probably causing the distortion or lack of "presence" in your tunes.

As others have mentioned, don't run your tunes too hot into a compressor before uploading because that'll cause the sound to degrade further

With regards to WAVs over MP3s, uploading your songs as .wavs is always nice but since it's all going to get compressed down to 128kbps anyway then I don't see much point in it (but that's just me)...

[Samuel_L_Damnson]

nah it does make a difference! Its because its only being compressed down once rather than being turned into a lossy format (320) and then being compressed again down to 128. Doing this is much worse than turning it straight from a wav to a 128. pretty sure you get more quantisation error.

[Still Young]

i've seen on point blank a tutorial with the french accent guy he show'd a plugin that emulates the bitrate he puts it on the master channel and it shows him how the tune will sound on various formats and bitrates
anyone know the name of the plugin?

[Dub_Fiend]

nah it does make a difference! Its because its only being compressed down once rather than being turned into a lossy format (320) and then being compressed again down to 128. Doing this is much worse than turning it straight from a wav to a 128. pretty sure you get more quantisation error.

I guess you're right, didn't think of that... still, 320kbps is nigh-on imperceptible from a 'regular human ear' standpoint but I guess the difference is the act of compressing the waveform twice can cause the issue... Whether that difference is major or not remains to be seen though.

[kaili]

yh sc is a bitch for that, always ruins the high end on my tunes too

[alphacat]

http://www.justmastering.com/article-mixingformp3.php

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/masterin ... ality.html

And in fact,

https://www.google.com/search?q=soundcl ... io+quality

There's a lot of discussion on this topic, which means that it is definitely an issue. I've noticed a certain dullness in my tracks that happens from time to time, and it seems to be directly related to my unfortunate masterchain dependency.

[nowaysj]

i've seen on point blank a tutorial with the french accent guy he show'd a plugin that emulates the bitrate he puts it on the master channel and it shows him how the tune will sound on various formats and bitrates
anyone know the name of the plugin?

I've never seen the frenchman, but I bet you're referring to this:


http://www.sonnoxplugins.com/pub/plugin ... olbox.html

[Still Young]

i've seen on point blank a tutorial with the french accent guy he show'd a plugin that emulates the bitrate he puts it on the master channel and it shows him how the tune will sound on various formats and bitrates
anyone know the name of the plugin?

I've never seen the frenchman, but I bet you're referring to this:


http://www.sonnoxplugins.com/pub/plugin ... olbox.html

thanksssss

[titchbit]

do you guys know for sure that soundcloud reduces the bit rate to 128. i'm not sure that's true.

edit 2: oops did not mean to edit after ppl had responded.

[nowaysj]

You download the original uploaded file, if I'm not mistaken.

[Huts]

.....i don't think soundcloud reduces to 128 kbps. when you download off soundcloud, it says 320.

streaming on soundcloud is at 128 kbps, you download whatever the uploader put the track up as