Buzzing sound in Sound Cloud upload

[Red Black]

Link?

[Lagerfeldt]

Does it sound like aliasing?

You have 1 dB of headroom, but inter-sample peaks can be higher than that. However, if you're not limiting very much I doubt that's the problem, but definitely check it out.

Try a 320 kbps with 3 dB of headroom as a test. Also, try uploading only a short MP3, e.g. 30 seconds.

[tpad]

If I remember correctly, TC Electronics was suggesting that you limit peak levels to around -5 to -6 dBFS for material feeding into MP3 encoding.

[huejahfink]

Originally Posted by tpad

If I remember correctly, TC Electronics was suggesting that you limit peak levels to around -5 to -6 dBFS for material feeding into MP3 encoding.

From Lund's paper - "DISTORTION TO THE PEOPLE"

"1) Attenuate the signal in the digital domain.

Most consumer CD players and broadcast processors will survive when the signal is lowered by 3 dB, while data reduction codecs (MP3, AAC, DTS, AC3 etc.) may require up to 5 dB attenuation or more, depending on data rate."

A suggestion which has been clearly embraced by the mastering community then...

[Autophase]

make sure youre sound interface settings are 16/44 when listening to stuff from the internet.

My RME defaults to 24/96 when I use cubase (and stays like that) When I play stuff on winamp or soundcloud i hear a highfrequency noise like its been through a bit crusher, this is the noise of the on the fly resampling.
Set the interface to the native resolution of the source and hey presto.... its gone.

[tpad]

In addition, hypercompressed audio isn't a good technique to use with nonlinear encoding. Better off leaving some dynamic range in the content.