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Iv recently started to notice a little bit of distortion in my uploads to soundcloud, my mixes before the upload sound perfectly good but while streaming on soundcloud iv noticed a distinct loss in quality. iv been uploading 320 mp3s, I know soundcloud reduces it to 128, so is it best just to upload 128 kbps in the first place?

just upload a wav, sure it might take longer, or end up being slightly lossy, but at least you know you've posted the highest quality you can.

Soundcloud's own staff says uploading anything higher then 128k is a waste, as your music will be downsampled to 128k anyway. Uploading higher is putting it in their hands to do your conversion for you.

Unless your enabling downloads... thats different

Teknicyde wrote:Soundcloud's own staff says uploading anything higher then 128k is a waste, as your music will be downsampled to 128k anyway.

ye thats what i was thinkin so uploadin 320 could potential be worse thatn uploadin a 128

DanFellows wrote:ye thats what i was thinkin so uploadin 320 could potential be worse thatn uploadin a 128

Yeah, as backwards as that sounds, on soundcloud, i guess its true...

i stress this is only if your not enabling downloads, if you are, give your downloaders something quality to work with.

64kbps
wanka style.

anyway i usually upload 320´s because i can´t be arsed to make a 128 but i think i hear difference between 128k clips and 320´s and 128 go better..

the best way is, upload it with 16kbit MONO sorry for joking ^^ haha

ariosa wrote:just upload a wav, sure it might take longer, or end up being slightly lossy, but at least you know you've posted the highest quality you can.

Yeah this. If you upload a 128kb MP3 it's re-encoded again (reducing quality) to 128kb by soundcloud right? further making it sound worse than uploading a WAV and it only being encoded once.

I use 320 to accomodate people downloading. I don't think people want my mixes/tunes in .wav and I want people downloading to have the best quality without it having to be large wav filesize. I also don't want people to bump a 128 on a good system in their home/car should they choose to download it.

True, but for streaming purposes only, i think the 128 might be better than the 320, because soundcloud dont have to reduce the bit rate again

Promise One wrote:

ariosa wrote:just upload a wav, sure it might take longer, or end up being slightly lossy, but at least you know you've posted the highest quality you can.

Yeah this. If you upload a 128kb MP3 it's re-encoded again (reducing quality) to 128kb by soundcloud right? further making it sound worse than uploading a WAV and it only being encoded once.

Nope, i thought that too and then asked on THEIR forum.

Teknicyde wrote:

Promise One wrote:

ariosa wrote:just upload a wav, sure it might take longer, or end up being slightly lossy, but at least you know you've posted the highest quality you can.

Yeah this. If you upload a 128kb MP3 it's re-encoded again (reducing quality) to 128kb by soundcloud right? further making it sound worse than uploading a WAV and it only being encoded once.

Nope, i thought that too and then asked on THEIR forum.

From the soundcloud forum

"hi,
we re-encode all tracks in 128kbs for streaming on the web. this is done to gain performance for the streams. so yes, the sound quality of the streams is degraded. but we use the best possible mp3 encoding algoritms so the quality should be far better than e.g. myspace.
in the future we might consider to stream in 320kbs mp3 or (more likely) 128-256kbs AAC. this should improve the sound quality to be almost on par with CD. but as of now we're using 128kbs mp3 as it is a good trade-off between quality/performance (and also since AAC streaming is only available since the flash 9 moviestar release, which has about 90% penetration as of now, we need it to be ~95 before we move)."

hey guys, just to let you know that we (the soundcloud team) are monitoring this thread and are eager to hear more of your feedback. Our goal is to have the best-sounding site on the internet, but that is pretty tricky to achieve given how many different encoding/audio formats that exists.
We currently transcode tracks down to 128 kbs CBR mp3 for the streams, so yes, stream quality is obviously worse than for uncompressed files. We are looking for alternatives (aac and ogg) for this in the future. we are also considering higher bitrates.
In the meantime, if you want optimal sound quality, you should upload uncompressed files, anything that is WAV, AIF, FLAC in 16bit or more, and 44.1khz or more, will yield the best stream quality. If you are uploading, say a 256kbs mp3 file, we will take that file and transcode it to 128kbs, which means you'll get the artifacts from the 256 encoding + the ones from the 128 encoding, which will sound worse than if you went from lossless->128. So that's my recommendation if you really care about audio quality!

Howabout when you upload tracks through the VibeDeck SoundCloud "app"? they seem to have their own upload process.

Is the streaming still converted to 128 kbps? Its good to know that the downloads are still in WAV form. Thanks SoundCloud

Upping their streaming to too high a quality like 320 would be a terrible idea. There would be Soundcloud rips for days. and I don't get as much joy from watermarking as much as skream

Cheers Promise, cleared everything up : )

Soundcloud