YouTube Audio Normalizer *HELP*

[Waryth]

Any YouTubers out here or have background knowledge about the issue?

It seems YouTube have Audio Normalizer in place to prevent screamers and loud obnoxious noises. It's a good thing but I want my audio quality of my videos to be BANGERS.

If I want it to be loud, YouTube lowers it because of that Audio Normalizer technology. How the heck you get round with this? It ruins loud music for a good purpose.

I have a deadline to work on that requires YouTube. SEND HELP. I'm dying.

[Azza ☠]

Youtube audio quality is merely low to start off with... official music videos quality are even bad. It's hardly a platform for audiophiles. Nor is it surround sound.

YouTube audio quality are limited - low 48kbps AAC, normal/default 128kbps AAC, or high 256kbps AAC.

So the best you can do is a bitrate of 256kbps, with the Codec: AAC-LC

Channels: 2 (stereo)
Bit depth: 24-bit recommended

And yes it will force Audio Normalizer upon it, so keep the sounds equal/balanced and not a massive range.

Note: The video resolution quality also seems to limited the maxed allowed audio quality. So a 144p video will only have a Bitrate of 24-48 kbps, 360p video has 64-128 kbps. You ideally want at least 1080p resolution (which I think is the normal 128 kbps or a bit higher), if not 1440p (2K) or 2160p (4K) as that can get up to the 256 kbps.

[Waryth]

İlk olarak Azza ☠ tarafından gönderildi:

Youtube audio quality is merely low to start off with... official music videos quality are even bad. It's hardly a platform for audiophiles. Nor is it surround sound.

YouTube audio quality are limited - low 48kbps AAC, normal/default 128kbps AAC, or high 256kbps AAC.

So the best you can do is a bitrate of 256kbps, with the Codec: AAC-LC

Channels: 2 (stereo)
Bit depth: 24-bit recommended

And yes it will force Audio Normalizer upon it, so keep the sounds equal/balanced and not a massive range.

Note: The video resolution quality also seems to limited the maxed allowed audio quality. So a 144p video will only have a Bitrate of 24-48 kbps, 360p video has 64-128 kbps. You ideally want at least 1080p resolution (which I think is the normal 128 kbps or a bit higher), if not 1440p (2K) or 2160p (4K) as that can get up to the 256 kbps.

Thanks for the details but the thing is I'm using 256 kbps audio bitrate for a 1080p @60 FPS gaming video and the sound are still low.

[Waryth]

İlk olarak Midori tarafından gönderildi:

Is the normalisation baked into the file or just the player?

The video file is fine. Uploading it to YouTube normalizes the audio.

Music-only videos sound awful because Volume/Normalized setting is set to DRC

It terribly affects the music video part of YouTube to which they purposely intend it so that we mostly use YouTube Music app/site for that purpose.

[slowdeath]

i'm using tampermonkey to run this browser script
https://gist.github.com/abec2304/2782f4fc47f9d010dfaab00f25e69c8a

every once in a while it breaks but refreshing the video usually fixes it

[𝓒𝓪𝓻𝓻𝓸𝓽 🥕]

Most all online streaming of music normalizes audio, its how it keeps a consistent volume in the playback. The only thing you can do is master the audio to a certain range so Youtube doesnt duck it as much, Its always going to be crappy quality though because its youtube.

It normalizes for viewer comfort, for example if you are listening to a piano piece in pp and then a dubstep track plays right after it you don't need to manually change volume to avoid blowing your speakers out.

The only way to handle this whilst keeping as higher quality audio as possible is to master the audio close to the range youtube normalizes to which I believe is around -14 LUFS.

LUFS stands for loudness units relative to full scale and its the industry standard for measuring loudness of sound.

If your music is above -14 LUFS then youtube will duck it into that range, if you over compress and master it poorly it will be distorted and lack the full range when its normalized, happens all the time with bad mixdowns like when people over compress because they want their music bassy and boomy.

While its true that "loud sounds better" in hindsight, theres no way to bypass or get around how Youtube handles audio, you just need to make sure you are using a properly mixed uncompressed track in no lower than 44khz. The higher quality the mix the less you will feel the effect of youtubes normalizing. The closer it is to -14 LUFS, the better.

If you are specifically trying to add a loud song to your video way outside the normalization range you can expect clipping and just terribly quality all round when youtube attempts to lower it. I recommend trying to aim for no higher than 7-8 LUFS at the loudest peaks of the song for best results.

If you don't have a metre for reading LUFS you can find some plugins on google for video and audio editing software respectively.

[Waryth]

İlk olarak 𝓐ღ𝔂 tarafından gönderildi:

Most all online streaming of music normalizes audio, its how it keeps a consistent volume in the playback. The only thing you can do is master the audio to a certain range so Youtube doesnt duck it as much, Its always going to be crappy quality though because its youtube.

It normalizes for viewer comfort, for example if you are listening to a piano piece in pp and then a dubstep track plays right after it you don't need to manually change volume to avoid blowing your speakers out.

The only way to handle this whilst keeping as higher quality audio as possible is to master the audio close to the range youtube normalizes to which I believe is around -14 LUFS.

LUFS stands for loudness units relative to full scale and its the industry standard for measuring loudness of sound.

If your music is above -14 LUFS then youtube will duck it into that range, if you over compress and master it poorly it will be distorted and lack the full range when its normalized, happens all the time with bad mixdowns like when people over compress because they want their music bassy and boomy.

While its true that "loud sounds better" in hindsight, theres no way to bypass or get around how Youtube handles audio, you just need to make sure you are using a properly mixed uncompressed track in no lower than 44khz. The higher quality the mix the less you will feel the effect of youtubes normalizing. The closer it is to -14 LUFS, the better.

If you are specifically trying to add a loud song to your video way outside the normalization range you can expect clipping and just terribly quality all round when youtube attempts to lower it. I recommend trying to aim for no higher than 7-8 LUFS at the loudest peaks of the song for best results.

If you don't have a metre for reading LUFS you can find some plugins on google for video and audio editing software respectively.

Thank you very much! This is the kind of answer I was looking for.