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MicroD wrote:

While we're at it... Has anyone else noticed that sometimes Bandcamp's streaming playback seems of especially low quality, even for 128kbps? I've had songs come out of the streaming player sounding almost as if they've been resampled numerous times, with telltale signs of garbled low-end and fizzy highs. It's a shame I can't encode and upload my own streaming versions for better quality.

i think i might have info on this! i looked into the same issue with soundcloud (terrible streaming sound) and it turns out that how they compress it makes a mess of things that are louder than -3db (if i rember correctly), so those of us that are mastering hot get audio artifacts all over the place. so if its worth it to you to make quieter recordings for the sake of streaming quality, idk?

Sorry about the warble, Michael. We've encoded millions of files at 128k without a hangup, so this is unlikely to be a bug. We use straight up LAME to encode our streaming MP3 files, and and artifacts do pop up from time to time. Unfortunately there isn't a way to replace our streaming files with ones you've encoded yourself, but (if it reassures you) the incredible majority of fans will never even notice the side effects of lower-quality transcodes.

Thanks for the info and the compares, Michael. This is just a limitation of our encoding, I'm afraid. Two things might make you feel better about it, though (even though these aren't brilliant pillars of goodness). The first is, again, that most fans actually wouldn't notice the difference in the two recordings even if they had them both for comparison. The second is that no one will have two versions for comparison, and those folks with sharp enough ears to be upset by the issues with the streaming files are also likely to have encountered less-than-perfect encoding jobs while sampling other music elsewhere online. Amazon sounds like ass, as a matter of fact.

If we find ourselves running into these sorts of warbles with greater frequency as time goes on, we will return to our codec settings and upload process, and make clever changes accordingly. Thanks for keeping your tunes as pristine as possible.

Cheers!

Anyhow, back on-topic... will they let you stick .zips in there if you're powered up like egr? piggy projects baby....