YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin

Yeah if you buy commercial pop crap on CD it is going to sound crap regardless of compression.

"Better heard on Beats headphones" maybe?

I noticed! I am a bass player who now happens to write software in the audio industry (I work for a company that makes hardware). But I noticed before coming here.

Some of the worst CDs in my record collection are: 1. Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full (this is the worst album I own - considering Sir Paul left The Beatles over the mix of The Long and Winding Road, he should leave his own band over his master of this album.... I wonder if Phil Spector bribed Bob Ludwig to do that in time-delayed revenge???)

2. Rush - Vapor Trails (not helped by distortion during recording; it's one BIG square wave)

3. The Fratellis - Costello Music (distortion all the way through the album)

4. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium (there's no possible way to make the first track sound quiet, try it!); apparently the vinyl has a different master and sounds infinitely better.

5. Foo Fighters - One By One (boxy drum sound and non-compliant CD format aside [chock full of copy protection so you won't see "Compact Disc" on the CD at all....], it's loud loud loud).

I could go on.

Considering the effort musicians go to get the best sound engineers, recording equipment, A to D converters, studio time and instruments, to throw it all away on a LOUD CD seems stupid to me. It means the album won't stand the test of time, and will sound as abysmal in the future as the day it was released; it is very short-sighted to release a LOUD CD for commercial gain (radio??? does anyone master just for radio still?) in the short term.

The examples you've cited look to be mastered (or at least sourced) differently. True loudness normalization should not affect the short term dynamic range of the material. It simply looks at the average level and lowers or raises it to some preset point. YT could be doing inter-song normalization, i.e. adjusting parts within the song to the same overall level - but this is not a good thing as it would affect properly mastered tracks too.

Your example seems to show a completely clipped sample (in the CD) and a more reasonably mastered copy (in the YT clip) with greater dynamic range. Once the dynamic range has been destroyed through compression (not digital compression, I'm speaking of gain compression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_compression) it would difficult or nearly impossible to restore without affecting the quality.

My guess - in this instance, I think the CD and YT clips come from different masters.

Wait, the audio in YouTube doesn't come from the CD? I never suspected that. I thought the article referred to that they took the audio, sourced from the CD, and lowered the volume if it was too loud (which obviously can't bring the dynamic range back).

Both of your links ([2] and [3]) are to YouTube; if they are normalizing the audio (as claimed by the author), then you shouldn't be able to hear a difference, right?

The second video you link is 240p which is always going to have awful quality. You can't really use that for a comparison (unless I guess you force the first one to 240p too).

I think that is exactly the motivation: avoiding the random shifts in volume between videos. Pushing back against the loudness war was probably just a bonus.

It's like watching a series on TV and then getting blasted with EXTREMELY LOUD COMMERCIAL BREAKS (and they do that shit on purpose too).

With YouTube pushing auto-advancing to additional content, and heavily pushing playlists, this is even more important now.

But this is a problem with the design of the software, not with the video.

I hear you. In one way it's weird they only started doing it now: any somewhat decent audio player has this functionality built-in or at least available via plugins.

Yet I feel it would be more fair to all listeners and all people creating the music if everyone at least had the choice to hear the music as it was made to be heard originally.

Indeed. Perceived loudness is a complex mix of signal level, dynamic range, and frequency content. Perfectly undoing what was done in the mastering studio is not only difficult but maybe impossible.

Humans like loud music, so louder music sounds better and sell more. So, how do you make your music MAXIMUM LOUD? Well, our digital formats have a setting for how loud any given sound is, but you can't just set it to the maximum value because then all sounds in your track will be equally loud. Or can you? Not all parts of a cymbal "phish" is equally loud, so setting it all to max will distort the sound (sacrifice dynamic range), but will consumers really care?

Youtube, by adjusting all tracks to have the same average loudness, is basically saying "to those of you who would give up essential dynamic range, to purchase a little temporary loudness, you deserve neither dynamic range nor loudness"

The hope is that eventually labels will quit sacrificing dynamic range for loudness if all our digital music sources set the average loudness to be the same for all tracks.

Dynamic range compression (DRC) is destructive so of course the normalisation cannot repair the damage. But the point is there is no longer any reason to use DRC simply to try to increase the playback level because Youtube will undo any attempt. DRC now simply reduces the dynamic range, making music sound worse, not louder.

I believe what makes the author excited is the fact that Youtube makes this normalization in the first place, means that a properly mastered track and a track mastered for maximum loudness, will play at roughly the same volume. The benefit is that tracks where the dynamic range have not been compressed, will sound far better than the loudness tracks.

In other words, there is no reason for the studios to master for loudness (at least for Youtube audio).

I came here to say the same thing. This move probably has everything to do with making sure people don't have to constantly change the volume when shifting between music videos and random amateur cat videos. The simple fact is YouTube can't change the average loudness of a given audio track without applying some form of 'destructive' processing, either compression or expansion. A more dynamic track will always be on average, quieter than a less dynamic track. Re-processing a bunch of audio tracks with just normalization does not change their average loudness, unless of course they are selectively applying compression to audio they find in need of a boost.

people will stop doing it though, if they can't get any advantage out of it. see also "Mastered for iTunes"

> The average viewer will probably listen through laptop speakers in a noisy environment, and a large dynamic range is not helpful to them.

If you use compression on the assumption that a chunk of your audience will be listening on shitty speakers you ensure that anyone not listening on shitty speakers also gets a shitty experience. Perhaps Google would like YouTube to be a non-shitty experience for people with nice speakers (or headphones or whatever).

I had similar thoughts, but rather if this will shift musical taste in general. Hyperbolically spoken will the best (popular) musician and not the best sound engineer suceed.

It's probably about making their autoplay work. If you listen to a playlist, or just another video, you shouldn't need to adjust the volume constantly or risk blowing out your speakers.

Google's intent doesn't really matter (I think you're right, I don't see it as a targeted offensive against the loudness war), it's the response from labels that does.

Compressing music (in the loudness sense) at the source is never a good thing for the consumer; if it is required for a specific end user case then it should be done at that point rather than ruin music for every use case.

I don't buy for a second that it's necessary or helpful with the music that it is done to; which rarely has quiet passages. Compare the two masterings of Pharrell's "happy" I posted, the less compressed version sounds far better even on my 11" laptop's speakers, which should be pretty much 'as bad as it gets'.

I think the average viewer is a teenager with their headphones (Beats, maybe?) plugged into their cellphone.

Even the cheapest headphones make halving the dynamic range obvious on typical top of the charts pop tracks.

I don't think we (the consumers\audience) are ever going to win that war.

It's been suggested that this change guarantees that the ads can be louder than the content. After all, from Google's point of view the ads are the important thing that make money.

I can say that Korean Youtube commercials are so loud and jarring that they without fail inspire a keen and lasting hatred for the advertised product.

Yes it does. That is (partly) why those who love music often hate (too much) compression.

Dynamic range compression does destroy some information, but you can still change the final playback volume.

With Virgin Media I have to pretty much double the TV volume on HD channels to get the same volume level.

Higher signal to noise ratio. Dr. Barry Blesser suggests that "raising the loudness of music, like a double shot of whisky, elevates the intensity of the experience". Listeners undergo significant, measurable changes in mind-body states and Blesser reckons that "loud music is simply a stronger stimulant than soft music".

Blesser - The Seductive (Yet Destructive) Appeal of Loud Music: http://www.blesser.net/downloads/eContact%20Loud%20Music.pdf

Psychoacoustic tricks such as compression and EQ allow us to increase perceived loudness without crossing the threshold of pain.

3, 4, and 6 in this article explain this psychoacoustic phenomena pretty well: http://getthatprosound.com/hacking-your-listeners-ears-9-psy...

And this article argues in depth, that the relationship between actual/perceived dynamic range is ultimately an artistic choice, yielding different feels. What people who complain about loudness are really objecting to is the improper use of these techniques: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep11/articles/loudness.htm

I don't know what he's alluding to, even though I'm very familiar with the issue and quite familiar with the ITU loudness standard. I posted mainly because I had noticed the change myself over the last few months.

Maybe he means the fact that if you don't have an adblocker YouTube ads seem to be as loud as the ones on TV used to be. It might be that this will now fall under the aegis of the FCC :) but I'm not really sure about that. Video ads on Youtube are a betrayal of the Google Adwords approach anyway, and the people who gave them the green light should be shot, but with very small calibre bullets so we can keep shooting them over and over until they get the message about how annoying advertising in temporal media is.

I'm not sure what he's alluding to. It may be that they've done simple loudness normalisation instead of one of the more preferable, advanced techniques, like ReplayGain 1.0, R128, or BS.1770 (/ReplayGain 2.0)?

Not sure if it's still a thing but I used to have a TV that did this. Basically if the overall volume increased more than a certain amount it would drop it a little bit. I believe you could set it by the input you were using so it applied to cable TV but not your A/V input (so it didn't mess with movies on DVD for example).

Youtube can do this becuase they have the whole video before they transcode it, and by then they know its average loudness. TV sets receive the content as they play it, so they can only do this if they play the content with some delay, since they otherwise can't know in advance what the average loudness is going to be. They can of cause cap it at some maximal loudness, but that would also cap the loudness of the loudest section of movies as well, and by that reducing the dynamic range.

Not sure why this is downvoted and at the very bottom of the thread.

If the article is true, youtube/google is using their market power in one sector to limit artistic and creative decisions in another sector. If mastering houses simply make a youtube mix next to their CD mix than the title is wrong.