5 comments

[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 11.4 ms ] thread
alt title: Less Is More: Why SoundCloud Low-passes its AAC Transcodings
Or if we want to be slightly more pendantic, why `libfdk_aac` (not SoundCloud per se) defaultly restricts the input's frequency range when encoding.

My guess is that this default surprised SoundCloud, and that this blog post is an attempt to (1) retroactively rationalize missing this difference with a reasonable-sounding explanation, even though it doesn't make sense at 256 kbps, and (2) create something that their support folks can point at when people complain.

I've been sharing music on SoundCloud for a decade and I am genuinely interested in this topic, but I cannot stand how strongly this post reeks of LLM writing. Do people releasing this kind of content not notice all the clichés?
As the years go by I get more and more annoyed by the fact you cannot sort results by upload-time on Soundcloud. Your only time-related option is a filter which makes no guarantee about the order of results.
Cutoff at 17 kHz is certainly a viable trade-off in lossy audio compression, but calling it an _upgrade_ is pretty controversial, if not dishonest.