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highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 8:18 am
by 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? :x

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 8:49 am
by syrup
it's a sc ting

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 11:24 am
by NinjaEdit
Soundcloud converts to 128kb/s MP3 which may be causing the problem.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 1:20 pm
by 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

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 3:42 pm
by rockonin
I upload my tracks to soundcloud using a .wav file format. Have you tried that?

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 10:13 pm
by 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.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:29 am
by 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.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:55 am
by 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?

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:53 am
by 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.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:58 am
by 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)...

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 12:07 pm
by 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.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 12:46 pm
by 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?

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 1:41 pm
by Dub_Fiend
Sinestepper wrote: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.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:24 pm
by kaili
yh sc is a bitch for that, always ruins the high end on my tunes too

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 6:07 pm
by 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.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:05 pm
by nowaysj
Still Young wrote: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

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:41 pm
by Still Young
nowaysj wrote:
Still Young wrote: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 :h:

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:24 pm
by 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.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:27 pm
by nowaysj
You download the original uploaded file, if I'm not mistaken.

Re: highs fucking up on soundcloud

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:28 pm
by Huts
dubunked wrote:.....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