http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr12/articles/lost-in-translation.htm

After reading the article linked above, now I know why my mixes sound different on Soundcloud, BandCamp, etc., (since they all stream 128 mp3 quality) than they sound as the original wave. Not sure about Youtube or Vimeo, maybe the sound quality is better. So I figure well it's what we all have to live with and it's different but listenable.

But I was about to post a new song and the mix which I thought sounded good here sounds absolutely wretched at 128 kbps with warbling almost garbled acoustic guitar and artifacts so it’s back to the drawing board to figure what on earth I did.

From what I’ve read after searching, possible culprits could be - headroom ( but I’m no where near clipping), too much high freq (maybe but I‘d be surprised), panned too wide (hard to believe that would do it), compression (don‘t think so but …), or phase (checked in mono that’s not a problem). Thought it might be a bad connection so I put the wave into Audacity and used the LAME to encode a 128 mp3 myself - the result was not quite as wretched but still bad. Drat.

Is it just me, or do any of ya’ll have ever have to go back and remix to get things to sound right at that low bitrate? I’m just frustrated. It seems like sometimes I take one step forward and two steps back on this mixing. smile

Josie Beck Youtube Channel
Josie Beck Soundcloud