Originally Posted By: Teunis
Here is an Izotope view on mastering for Soundcloud et al.

https://www.izotope.com/en/blog/mastering/mastering-for-compressed-audio-formats.html

Tony



I think the important part of this article is:


"Mastering for SoundCloud

SoundCloud transcodes uploaded audio to 128 kbps MP3 to prepare the audio to stream from the site. If an audio file on SoundCloud is made available for download, the downloaded version will be in the original format.

Uploading an MP3 is redundant since SoundCloud will transcode it anyway, which could in turn introduce more artifacts to audio that’s already compressed. Therefore, the best practice is to upload an uncompressed, 24-bit .WAV file and allow SoundCloud to process it."



Bandcamp does 128 as well, but to me, the files just sound better. Perhaps they are using a different encoder, I don't really know about that.


Regards,


Bob