Mastering a track to be streamed on Soundcloud and bandcamp.

[Welsh_7/8stinger]

Hi, since i started recording my own material i've been using soundcloud to show it to people. Recently I've noticed that when ever i post a mix to sound cloud, in any format, the quality of the mix goes down severally. Here is the sound cloud for a cover i did and the dropbox link. I did prior to posting this thread do a forum search for this topic.

Do any of you guys know of any ways to master a track so that these issues are less (ideally are) non existent?



https://www.dropbox.com/s/av9ie5yargirsiv/Black Metal (Venom) Cover.wav?dl=0

I'm using my cover as a example of the issue i'm having with soundcloud/bandcamp style platforms. This ain't a 'critique my mix' thread.

 

[wishtheend]

Essentially what you would be doing is taking away the same frequencies that get lost in Soundcloud's conversion which I've always assumed was something horrible like 128kbps. And there's no promise you reducing stuff prior to upload would prevent their conversion from wrecking it further. Bandcamp sometimes doesn't sound as bad, but they still do 128kbps on the stream. I think a lot of people have moved over to Youtube since in 1080 I think they up to 192kbps or so. Either way, master so it sounds best in it's pure wave state, and find the streaming service that bothers you the lease or use dropbox or similar.

 

[Welsh_7/8stinger]

Essentially what you would be doing is taking away the same frequencies that get lost in Soundcloud's conversion which I've always assumed was something horrible like 128kbps. And there's no promise you reducing stuff prior to upload would prevent their conversion from wrecking it further. Bandcamp sometimes doesn't sound as bad, but they still do 128kbps on the stream. I think a lot of people have moved over to Youtube since in 1080 I think they up to 192kbps or so. Either way, master so it sounds best in it's pure wave state, and find the streaming service that bothers you the lease or use dropbox or similar.

Thanks man. Do you by any chance have a rough idea of which frequancies those might be?

 

[Loki Laufeyiarson]

Have you tried not pushing it's volume as high as possible and crushing the dynamics? This will cause serious problems when converting to lower bitrates for streaming stuff.

Here's a link to an article that goes way more in depth on the matter and that might help you further.

 

[waltz mastering]

Do any of you guys know of any ways to master a track so that these issues are less (ideally are) non existent?

I didn't listen to the link but going at it with a daft touch seems to work better than going full tilt.

For streaming or anything destined to being distributed at 256 kbps (or less) lossy, it's best to leave a ceiling of -.8 to-1dBFS
This helps prevent isps from getting out of hand when converted.

If a lossless file is on the verge of breaking up or saturation, it will get even more grainier or even more saturated when it goes to lossy,
because distortion added through the process is accumulative. gl

 

[Paschalis I.]

Just master your track just like you would master it anyway.
I mean, master it for a WAV file or/and a 320kbps mp3 file.

Play the files. Do you like them? That's it you're done.

I can't understand why so many people on the internet ask those kind of questions...
You should not master differently for 10 versions for soundcloud, youtube, itunes etc...

Just upload to them a perfectly mixed and mastered 320kbps mp3 or
a dithered 44.1/16 WAV file and they should work fine.

We live in 2016 where the streaming platforms can easily accept a 320kbps mp3,
so in my humble opinion we should focus on mixing and mastering better rather than mastering
differently for each platform like it matters.