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Whats with all these Audiophile YouTube Playlists?

IowAudio

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I've come across so many of these audiophile playlists on YouTube with nice music but are they really hi-res, flac, 24bit, etc? I highly doubt it. Many of the comments of these video's people state they love the sound quality or finally found some good 24bit audio. From what I can find YouTube maxes out at 165 or 192kbps at 44.1khz depending on encoding and codec. This isn't even CD quality. I know hi quality audio files can be uploaded but will be compressed before playback. Does anyone know for certain or have solid proof of YouTube audio quality. Here's a few links to a source and some of these playlists.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-audio-quality-of-4k-videos-in-YouTube

 

ZolaIII

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Well there are quite a lot different ones, some are from chosen recordings materials other played through interesting systems (amplifiers and speakers) then recorded back which I find very interesting as you can feel difference there for better & worse (most interesting part is you can get actual speakers sound through earphones/headphones). YouTube audio quality is worst of any streaming service including quality Internet radio broadcasts but it certainly is popular.

Edit:
More on the audio quality topic & of course YouTube.
 
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Fluffy

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I recorded some of it in loopback mode in Audacity. Looking at the spectral view, this audio have frequencies up to 20 khz, so I assume this is a high bitrate lossy codec. Probably better than 192kbps, could be even 320.

This is (yet another) proof that high bitrate lossy audio can sound very well and even undistinguishable from lossless in some circumstances. And also, you don't need 24 bit or higher than 44.1khz sample rates.
 

Doodski

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high bitrate lossy audio can sound very well and even undistinguishable from lossless in some circumstances.

I use YouTube for near several hours a day for music because I like the music videos but when comparing it to lossless files or the better streamers I find YouTube audio to seem like it is missing tiny bits and sounds choppy or with slight tiny interruptions in the audio. The lossless and better streamers sound smoother as well as simply better. Canadians don't have Amazon Lossless HD yet but the day it's here I'm on that!
 
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IowAudio

IowAudio

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I downloaded a 4k and 1440p playlist from "Audiophile Music" claiming High quality. I used WinX YouTube Downloader and got them in the highest quality then used a program called MediaInfo to pull up the data. Here are some screen shoots. Both show 48khz 32bit Lossy, I'm not sure what this translates into for kbps or if its good quality or not.
 

Attachments

  • 4k YT Audio.JPG
    4k YT Audio.JPG
    93.7 KB · Views: 796
  • 1440p YT Audio.JPG
    1440p YT Audio.JPG
    102 KB · Views: 544
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IowAudio

IowAudio

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After downloading a few different videos in different resolutions and file types I noticed a few things. If I download them as MP4 the audio is usually 128kbps , 44.1khz AAC LC. If I download as webm then the audio is 32bit, 48khz Opus. I watched a bunch of different videos and if you right click on the video and select "stats for nerds" it doesn't show the audio bit rate but it does show the codec and every video I played in any resolution used the Opus audio codec. So is YouTube actually streaming a Lossy 32bit/48khz audio? If so that's pretty decent, or am I missing something here???
 

majingotan

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After downloading a few different videos in different resolutions and file types I noticed a few things. If I download them as MP4 the audio is usually 128kbps , 44.1khz AAC LC. If I download as webm then the audio is 32bit, 48khz Opus. I watched a bunch of different videos and if you right click on the video and select "stats for nerds" it doesn't show the audio bit rate but it does show the codec and every video I played in any resolution used the Opus audio codec. So is YouTube actually streaming a Lossy 32bit/48khz audio? If so that's pretty decent, or am I missing something here???

Depends on the browser BTW, I use Internet Explorer and Youtube streams at 128 kbps 44.1KHz AAC LC. There might be something wrong with the software as I have never seen a lossy 32 bit audio encode. Can you show a spectrum graph of that Opus file?

Untitled.png
 

ZolaIII

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@lowAudio first of all you need to understand what Opus is. It's hibryd codec;
http://opus-codec.org/docs/
In the case of full wide band or more & with higher bit rates it's basically the old OGG. In hybrid mode (with Speex) narrow~broad band & small bit rate it smacks everything else in lossy world, generally has both better lows and highs than anything else but things change with high bit rate where MP3 still rules to 98% of lossless ratio to CD quality at 280 KB/s. However Opus is (really!) lo latency and has 24, 32 bit modes (what is used is automatically determined by codec and can be mix of them based on estimated complexity). Biggest Opus problem is a hard cut of anything above 20 KHz meaning even 48 KHz ends up as 40 KHz. Some would say that's not a big problem but I come to think differently with evaluation of DSD.

YouTube will do trans-coding of materials automatically and from uploaded source where there's less limitations & lossless audio is supported (flac, wav) regarding source. Milage will vary based mostly on the bit rate YouTube chose when converting. You can simply extract audio source from any YouTube video by copying audio stream on it's own with for instance ffmpeg (even on mobile) & putting it to it's belonging container.
 
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Fluffy

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After downloading a few different videos in different resolutions and file types I noticed a few things. If I download them as MP4 the audio is usually 128kbps , 44.1khz AAC LC. If I download as webm then the audio is 32bit, 48khz Opus. I watched a bunch of different videos and if you right click on the video and select "stats for nerds" it doesn't show the audio bit rate but it does show the codec and every video I played in any resolution used the Opus audio codec. So is YouTube actually streaming a Lossy 32bit/48khz audio? If so that's pretty decent, or am I missing something here???
No, that's a false reading. There is no such thing as " Lossy 32bit/48khz audio" – first of all, because 32 bit audio is absurd and not used in any delivery format. Second, the act of lossy compression "loses bits", so even if you started out with 16 bit the compressed files had not retained that full information. That's the point of compression.

It could be 48khz, but that would hardly make any audible difference.
 

Pio2001

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@lowAudio first of all you need to understand what Opus is. It's hibryd codec

If I understand correctly, it is a hybrid between lossy (low bitrate for speech) and lossy (high bitrate for music).
The quality is said to be Superior to AAC or Vorbis, themselves Superior to MP3, at a given bitrate.

So yes, all these YouTube videos have lossy compressed audio. The bitrate is unknown. It is not shown in the data posted by lowAudio above.

EDIT : anyway, video downloaders may transcode audio and video internally in order to produce the downloaded file.
To know the format that we are listening to in the YouTube video player, we need to analyse directly the raw data Stream.
 

Pio2001

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PS : it is also probable that, over the years, YouTube have transcoded their video archives from a format to another. Therefore even if we would receive a lossless raw audio data Stream today for a video posted years ago, it might have been transcoded from an old lossy original in Youtube's archives.
 

mvil

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I recorded some of it in loopback mode in Audacity. Looking at the spectral view, this audio have frequencies up to 20 khz, so I assume this is a high bitrate lossy codec. Probably better than 192kbps, could be even 320.

This is (yet another) proof that high bitrate lossy audio can sound very well and even undistinguishable from lossless in some circumstances. And also, you don't need 24 bit or higher than 44.1khz sample rates.


It's opus @ 160kbps
 

ZolaIII

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ZolaIII

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Already told you, download stream and use ffmpeg to extract audio.
Command Line & Gui example for Opus
Screenshot_20200227-131420.png
;
Screenshot_20200227-131412.png
 
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IowAudio

IowAudio

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Yeah, I'm not installing extra apps like this on my phone.
 
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IowAudio

IowAudio

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Depends on the browser BTW, I use Internet Explorer and Youtube streams at 128 kbps 44.1KHz AAC LC. There might be something wrong with the software as I have never seen a lossy 32 bit audio encode. Can you show a spectrum graph of that Opus file?

View attachment 51930
I tried a bunch of different videos on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox viewing the stats for nerds and they all show Opus as the audio codec.... so idk. I found a way to show a spectrum graph.
 
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IowAudio

IowAudio

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I think this solves it... On my PC all the "hi-res/audiophile" playlists I've tried play Opus 251 @ 240p or higher and Opus 250 @144p. Same for all browsers. Looks like Opus 251 is the best at 160kbps/48khz.

1582852005911.png
 

LeftCoastTim

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Also, Youtube does a lot of audio processing even before lossy compression. I know for a fact that they do some sort of dynamic compression and volume adjustment. Also, they do something to make clipped audio sound "better".
 
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