They both have shitty audio quality, but Spotify is less shitty than YouTube’s horrible data compression.
YouTube uses Opus 160kbps which is decent enough. YouTube also allows uploading videos with lossless audio.
So it’s more about what happens with the audio before it gets to YouTube. Someone uploads a video clip with 128kbps AAC, YouTube re-encodes it to Opus160, someone downloads it as 160kbps MP3, makes a lyrics video and whatever tool they used makes it into 96kbps Vorbis, it gets put on YouTube, Opus160 again, you download it as whatever bitrate MP3 again and it sounds like shit.
Just an example, there may be way more lossy re-encode generations going on.
It’s more about the generations rather than YouTube.
I dunno’, I hear a distinct difference between any YouTube video and the CD, even ones posted by the artists or labels directly.
Though I do not pay for YouTube premium and never will, so maybe it’s better if you pay the beast.
Either way, fuck the beast. … and not in a good way.
yea, it’s also just up to 160
using grayjay to download wham:last christmas gives us up to 134kbps opus. which is fine, it’s the official channel and all, so upload is pretty good.
Just talking, is more like 118kbps, a gresham lecture came in at that.
Opus is variable, which is pretty good. saves bandwith and all.
also to point out, youtube reencodes a lot of videos, so the older it is - the more likely it has been re-encoded. and youtube is not encoding from an old master file.
Point is, totally agree on the generational thing, which you (mostly) avoids with spotify.
it’s good enough for most audio setups if you find the decent audio on youtube first
This is horseshit, Opus 130k stereo is perceptually lossless according to many public listening tests. All responsibility for poor quality rests on the uploader and sometimes on idiotic downloaders that still dare to shit out MP3 in the year 2024.
The codec used for transmission is a tiny part of the production pipeline. Perhaps it is publishers choosing to mostly push lesser quality to YouTube, or videos uploaded before they started using better codecs, or any number of reasons.
The truth still stands that YouTube’s videos (at keast almost) universally have shitty audio quality.
Besides, look at it this way: YouTube can be accessed for free. Why would the publishers want to push a perfect replacement for buying the music on a free platform? They’d make less money.
I’m like an anti-audiophile in how little I usually care. I don’t use high quality equipment most of the time anyhow, so it doesn’t bother me at this point.
There are two Japanese bands that I can only listen to on Youtube, so I have to listen to them offline at 129kbs. ;_;
plus the fact some of the songs i can only find on youtube have sone of the most god awful quality imaginable
i think packet flier by terrorhorse takes the cake, or one of the songs off of kenza by khaled that literally has the cd skipping the entire time. and then 2 others are shitty bootleg live recordings, 1 from moby grape and the other from throwing muses. funny enough both were from self titled albums by bands that had 2 self titled albums, with 1 of the self titled albums on spotify while the one i wanted to listen to not on spotify
