I have a very eclectic taste in music, which I like to share with my Twitter friends. One way I do this is to find a music video on YouTube, shorten the link, and tweet it. Using a link shortener is cool, because a few of them tell you what state or country the clicks are coming from. This gives me some idea of who is listening.
It can be a little tedious trolling the internet for audio files, shortening links and tweeting them though. So lately I've been trying out the music sharing service blip.fm. Blip has some great features, the main one being that you can post a song (link) to Twitter directly from your blip.fm page. This is called "blipping" and it's really cool. You enter an artist and song title, preview the different results, then blip the one you like. The audio/video files are pulled from various music sharing services, with many of them coming from YouTube.
The problem with using YouTube to share music is that it was designed for video, audio is secondary. Video editing software typically compresses the audio as it renders the file. This means that audio quality suffers. I'm a musician and recording engineer, so I'm picky about sound, but a lot of the audio files on YouTube are so bad they make the casual listener cringe as well. What you're hearing are artifacts from too much DSP (digital signal processing). These artifacts are known by such names as aliasing, quantization noise, motorboating, and ringing. But you don't need to concern yourself with that. All you need to know is that they sound bad.
Some people who use YouTube to share music will make a very simple video, so the majority of bits can be allotted to the audio file. I appreciate this, but all in all, YouTube is just not that great for sharing music. This is evident by the large number of bad sounding files on blip.fm. When I'm searching for a song to blip, I have to wade through a lot of trashy audio. That's one nice thing about iTunes, you won't find completely ruined audio files.
If I ran a music sharing service, I would not use YouTube as a source for audio files. And from an artist perspective, I wouldn't like people turning my music into garbage and posting it on the internet. The music industry has dropped the ball I believe. They need a new file format that allows for artists to collect royalties while preventing multiple encoding. Bad sound is just not good for the brand, period.
Here's a few tips you can follow to keep audio clean. Don't re-encode mp3 files. Start with a .wav or .aiff file. I suspect multiple encoding to be the main culprit in all this bad sound. You can compress the shit out of the original file once and it will sound okay, but re-compressing mp3 is a big no-no. Also, use the mid to high quality VBR profiles in your mp3 encoder. VBR, or Variable Bit Rate encoding lowers file size without degrading the quality.
There is a glaring irony in online music. As technology improves, sound quality continues to suffer. I'd like to share a song right now, but so far I haven't found a decent sounding version of it on the internet. Given the time, I like to rip high quality mp3's from a CD and upload them. I'd like to see a service that allows me to do this while crediting the artist through the use of ID3 tags, ISRC code, whatever. The legal stuff should be handled automatically so we can all share good sounding music without fear of copyright infringement. It would save the music industry tons of money too. Or I don't know..... maybe they just like to sue people!
