Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

YouTube probably has the best catalogue of electronic music too, but since they removed the 256Kbps AAC format, we're stuck with the audibly lousy, frequency-limited 128Kbps crap. Well, it was good till it lasted.


What frequency limit do you see?

Opus is transparent at that rate. Heck it's virtually transparent at 96 kbps, and does a great job at 64 kbps.


They're probably getting mp3 streams I would imagine. Definitely not transparent at 128 kbps. I'm not sure who Youtube streams Opus to, I should look into that.


On a random electro-swing video I get the following choices in youtube-dl:

audio only DASH audio 53k , opus @ 50k, 1.01MiB

audio only DASH audio 69k , opus @ 70k, 1.34MiB

audio only DASH audio 130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 2.63MiB

audio only DASH audio 136k , vorbis@128k, 2.59MiB

audio only DASH audio 140k , opus @160k, 2.69MiB

Seems pretty decent to me.


Yes, I'm actually quite impressed that they offer opus @160k. The real issue with Youtube is that you never know what the source was. If they're reencoding that from a 128 kbps mp3, that suddenly becomes much less impressive.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: