Myspace Compression?

[Ganks]

Wasn't sure where to post this, so it ended up here. Feel free to move it if it needs to be moved.

Anyways..

Why does Myspace use such a shitty compression engine on their Flash player? I mean, there are PLENTY of High Quality players out there that I'm sure compress a little but still maintain the quality.

However, no band on Myspace would want to replace their Myspace music player with a 3rd-party player because this would mean that they couldn't see how many plays they had. Or no one could add their song to their personal page.

Myspace is very Web2.0, so why can't they increase the quality of their music players?

Honestly, before getting into recording, I never noticed the shitty quality. But now it just irritates the shit out of me and I hate listening to shit on myspace.

 

[Josh M.]

Yeah man, it sucks deeply. I have no idea why it is so crappy compared to every other player but I know that if I was to upload my mixes to a myspace (as the producer/engineer, not the band) I would be using a 3rd party player.

I have noticed it more recently as well and I would appreciate it (I'm sure a lot of others would to) if they just went and updated it. It makes bands and producers look like shit.

 

[NickL]

compared to the old myspace player its a godsend

 

[Arrowed Lung Studios]

I just use the soundclick player. The myspace player, is really hit or miss, some pages sound better than others. Either way it's not worth the risk of using the myspace player and having shifty clips.

 

[Ganks]

I just use the soundclick player. The myspace player, is really hit or miss, some pages sound better than others. Either way it's not worth the risk of using the myspace player and having shifty clips.

Well, I know quality-wise, the HQ players are 10x better.

But for bands who want to keep their statistics (play count, downloads, page adds, etc.) this is not an option.

 

[kdodson]

It's not the player on each myspace page sounds different, it's the mixes. To optimize your mix to sound better on myspace, make a separate mix and experiment withe the high frequencies. Try attenuating the higher frequencies using shelfing or using a low pass filter. Because lossy compression affects high frequencies first, that would naturally be the place to start when the end result will use some sort of data compression.

-Kacey

 

[Erlend_]

I agree.
I was kinda pissed off when they announced that now you could upload
twice as many songs as before.
Why not keep the same number of songs but 2x the quality?
Or at least give users the option to chose.

Myspace actually resamples to 22050Hz. Can you belive that shit?

 

[DanLights]

yeah there´s been threads (specially one by Anssi) concerning this, it´s the 22Khz conversion that kills the mixes, for some reason it downsamples all mp3s uploaded, which by the theory of Idontrememberwho kills all high frequency, because a 22khz sampling means that everything above the half of that suffers a slow, painful death (from 11 Khz on, approximately). If it´s over 40 khz, we will not hear the difference (we don´t hear or even work with anything above 20 Khz), but at such a low sampling rate, we can hear it allright

 

[rino655]

try soundcloud. looks very cool and the sound quality is superb

 

[dani]

FYI 128kbps mp3 has high end roll off at around 16khz, so the 11khz audible range of myspace isn't that huge a cut as you may think..

just sayin..

 

[Mago]

yeah its a pitty that it's so crappy sounding.
i was thinking that even before i ulpoadet own mixes. but after that experience, i felt like its even worse than i expected.
haven thought about doing myspace-mixes though....

but sometimes the myspaceplayer is a gift 4 bands:
once bought a song of a band that sounded quite good on myspace (at least the song).
surprisingly the guitarsound sounded better on myspace than on mp3.weird.

 

[DanLights]

FYI 128kbps mp3 has high end roll off at around 16khz, so the 11khz audible range of myspace isn't that huge a cut as you may think..

just sayin..

If that was directed to me, I stand corrected and props to you

I do still feel a high end fuck-up on many myspace tracks, to my ears it´s the cymbals that sound most affected

 

[richwn]

i like using ultimate-guitars profiles for displaying and showing music

good quality and pretty much good social networking without the farmville/glitter graphics/shit .

 

[DP40oz]

yeah its a pitty that it's so crappy sounding.
i was thinking that even before i ulpoadet own mixes. but after that experience, i felt like its even worse than i expected.
haven thought about doing myspace-mixes though....

but sometimes the myspaceplayer is a gift 4 bands:
once bought a song of a band that sounded quite good on myspace (at least the song).
surprisingly the guitarsound sounded better on myspace than on mp3.weird.

Yea I actually have found even with my own work, the Myspace player has a tendency to make even bad mixes sound somewhat decent, but if the mix is great it doesnt shine. Its almost like evening out the playing field.

 

[DanLights]

Yea I actually have found even with my own work, the Myspace player has a tendency to make even bad mixes sound somewhat decent, but if the mix is great it doesnt shine. Its almost like evening out the playing field.

that´s like playing a crappy sounding demo through your crap-sounding cellphone´s speaker. Since everything sounds crap, the demo doesn´t sound bad at all hahaha

 

[aortizjr]

Flash actually has a built-in MP3 decoder. So almost all the flash players out there for regular website use will just play whatever MP3 you put up there. That is sweet since you can use a good encoder at a good bitrate. I personally like LAME since it's presets do some additional tailoring.

Myspace actually decodes and then re-samples and re-encodes your MP3. But they still require an MP3 upload with a size limit. MP3 is already destruction for audio, and it hits again with even crappier sampling and encoding. Of course this cuts their storage and bandwidth significantly. With all the abandoned bands and general crap on there... I can understand where they are coming from.

At the same time I could convince myself it is a good thing. If the tracks on there sound not so great, and everyone knows it, like just a crappy preview. Then I will BUY the actual CD or MP3's from another site.

 

[narcossintese]

What annoys me to most is that the music page still has that 1.0 layout that is simply gross, and a pain in the ass to edit. The 2.0 style (only avaible to personal myspace accounts) is very good.

 

[Sacha]

I agree they should definitely improve that shit, but imagine the traffic they must get they are obviously trying to save on bandwidth a bit. At least everyone sounds equally crappy.

 

[dani]

they serve terabytes of music daily, and looking at the standard length 3:30 myspace mp3 being about 2.5-3.0mb, i'd say they save a fucking lot, over the "bare-minimum" 128kbps mp3.

it does suck though. i'd certainly prefer a myspace with half as much music at twice the quality.

thanks,

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

I did some tests on myspace's player and here is what I got (pink noise mp.3 IIRC):

The mp.3 before getting dumped into myspace:

The mp.3 after myspace rapes it:

My theory is that whatever is above 11k pretty much gets turned into noise, no idea why it notches out like that but I'm guessing what is shown above that notch is pure shitty noise. So I tried a HPF at that freq and it seemed to clean it up a bit. Overall though myspace's player is just about as bad as it gets. The only thing worse is purevolume to my ears.