fresh tripe

inky:

Soundcloud, I don’t understand your waveforms!

As far as I can tell, soundcloud is optimizing the waveform display to make the low level detail more apparent. Quiet passages are exaggerated visually. I think this is the right thing to do. Soundcloud is most frequently accessed via computer hardware that doesn’t really have decent audio hardware hung off of it. Or on white ear buds. In noisy environments. Quiet sections are more likely to be lost under these circumstances and a goosed visual cue is a good thing. 

Material that comes into soundcloud is frequently unmastered. Dynamic range is all over the place, but the waveform display must be tweaked to accommodate everything.

Essentially, the waveform display is generated from a serious compressor limiter. That doesn’t mean the uploaded audio is also dynamically compressed. It isn’t. This is just the visual representation we’re talking about.

And we’re not talking about the data compression that goes on, either. Regardless of the format you upload (lossless), anything you play from the widget will be compressed. I don’t know what it is, but it sounds terrible. But that’s the deal, right? They’re paying for the bandwidth, and you don’t want to stream huge files to your wireless device. So that’s life. Often you can download the original file, which I recommend.