Help with uploading songs to youtube

[Denni]

i want to upload songs to youtube, what's the best way to do it? i wanna save as much quality as possible.
currently i have mp3 file with mp3float codec, 44100 sample rate, 320bt/rate (foobar says codec mp3 cbr, tool lame3.97, if it has any importance). i'm trying to use open shot editor, i don't really care about video but audio, should i follow the exact same audio settings for exporting my video(basically song with still jpg) or there are better ways for youtube, though i tried to pick mp3float and mp3 as audio codec for video but it couldn't find it, but default aac worked out. does video codec or anything affect audio track? and then how about songs that are in flac or ogg or opus

 

[amirm]

From what I recall, youtube uses the resolution of video to decide the bandwidth it allocates to audio. You need to use a video creation tool that takes a single, high resolution image and converts it to video along with your audio track. Use your original audio codec without change. Google will convert that by itself.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

I don’t know that just music can be uploaded to Youtube. I mean, search for any song you can name and if it’s there, it’s a video. VSDC is a pretty good video editor. It’s free, but if you want to save a project to a format Youtube recognizes, it requires an annual license fee. Last time I checked, it was pretty reasonable, under $20.

Here are the published guidelines.

Video and audio formatting specifications - YouTube Help

These features are only available to partners using YouTube's Content Manager to manage their copyrighted content. You must be either the copyright holder or the

support.google.com

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[kemmler3D]

DaVinci Resolve is free (you could call it a demo because some features cost money, but the demo does a lot) and can encode the video however you need. Might be overkill for this but it's an option. Per Amir's comment, you'd want to create an image at 3840x2160 with the song title or whatever, and use that as the video track for the whole thing. Video codec won't matter and try to encode without re-encoding the audio track.

 

[Multicore]

i want to upload songs to youtube, what's the best way to do it? i wanna save as much quality as possible.

Idk what the best way is but you can upload an MPEG-4 file with FLAC and yt accepts and processes it. yt will in any case convert to Opus so I figure if I upload lossless audio then I can't do any better than that. FLAC is non-standard in MPEG-4 so not all software will do it, e.g. FFmpeg doesn't. But Reaper (the DAW I use) can do it via the Windows Media API, so that's what I do.

If all you've got is an MP3 file then you should be able to mux that into an MP4 file. Since yt will convert the audio and we don't understand that process we cannot optimize for it so I would guess your best options would be to mux the MP3 you've got into the MP4 continer without any processing or, if you think you can decode the MP3 better than yt can, then you do that and upload it as FLAC in the MP4.

 

[Multicore]

From what I recall, youtube uses the resolution of video to decide the bandwidth it allocates to audio. You need to use a video creation tool that takes a single, high resolution image and converts it to video along with your audio track. Use your original audio codec without change. Google will convert that by itself.

I've seen yt adjust to lower audio bit rates for playback but I wanted to check if the video resolution of the upload affects things so I did a test. Here it is. I encoded the MP4 file with 240p (426x240) at 1 frame per second and the audio as FLAC. It plays back with YT audio format 251, which is Opus, the best I know how to extract from yt.

These are the formats yt makes available for my test upload. In the yt player, "Stats for nerds" says I'm getting format 134 video and 251 audio.

Note that Opus uses 48 kHz sample rate so it makes sense to work in 48 to avoid any resampling, if you don't want to trust yt's resampling.

 

[RayDunzl]

I don’t know that just music can be uploaded to Youtube. I mean, search for any song you can name and if it’s there, it’s a video. VSDC is a pretty good video editor. It’s free, but if you want to save a project to a format Youtube recognizes, it requires an annual license fee. Last time I checked, it was pretty reasonable, under $20.

I uploaded one, once:

Don;t remember the gymnastics required to get it there, as it was eight years ago, but surely attempted to do it from a lossless copy from CD.

 

[staticV3]

I want to upload songs to youtube, what's the best way to do it? i wanna save as much quality as possible.

Nowadays, YouTube uses almost exclusively 48kHz Opus for Audio.

For best audio quality, I'd upload music in 48kHz WAV.

Though probably best to temper expectations:

Why do some YouTube videos sound better than streaming music files ?

YT video soundtracks are lower in quality than lossless, or even high-bitrate lossy, streaming services. However, like @Pearljam5000 I have periodically heard YT versions that I felt sounded good. And every single time I downloaded/extracted the audio from the YT video so I could load it into...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[Multicore]

Nowadays, YouTube uses almost exclusively 48kHz Opus for Audio.

For best audio quality, I'd upload music in 48kHz WAV.

Though probably best to temper expectations:

Why do some YouTube videos sound better than streaming music files ?

YT video soundtracks are lower in quality than lossless, or even high-bitrate lossy, streaming services. However, like @Pearljam5000 I have periodically heard YT versions that I felt sounded good. And every single time I downloaded/extracted the audio from the YT video so I could load it into...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Can you upload WAV to yt? If so, how?

You can put PCM in MP4 but I haven't been able to make that work with yt. I just got noise when I tried. Since FLAC works I gave up trying to find the variation of PCM formatting that works. But Idk about WAV.

 

[staticV3]

Can you upload WAV to yt? If so, how?

MKV

 

[Multicore]

MKV

For youtube?

 

[staticV3]

For youtube?

Sure

 

[Multicore]

Sure

Well that changes everything. YouTube now accepts MKV. The last time I tried was, I guess, more than a year ago.

For fun and misinformation try googling something like "since when does youtube accept mkv".

The test I just ran worked. Reaper using FFmpeg API to output 2K H.264 @1FPS and 16bit PCM audio into MKV and it worked in YouTube just fine.