Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

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RyanCo
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Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by RyanCo » Fri Jul 23, 2021 5:07 am

From the looks/sound of it, Taxi uses SoundCloud which is 64kbps mp3 quality for everything...which is sonically pretty bad.

I guess another post could be dedicated to complaining about this and/or pleading with them figure out a way to get this at least to 128kbps (especially for forwards!), but I'd like this post to address what people are doing to deal with it.

My observation is that the biggest problem with lo-fi lossy formats is that there is a lot of aliasing or other HF junk that gets added, and generally arrangements that are more sparse, less gritty, and slightly darker and lower in level than commercial standards tend to fare better (which is 100% the opposite of what I would send to a pub or A&R). IE "Ocean Eyes" is not terrible on SC, "See You In A Crown" sounds like crap.

I'm finding this challenging for stomp/clap-danger twins, black-skinhead and other aggressive type briefs. Feedback comes in that my mix is too lo-fi, which may well be the case, but it wasn't that lo-fi until I uploaded it!

I know that Sonnox has the 'Codec Toolbox' plugin, which allows you to audition your mix at 64kbps mp3. Anyone using that? Any other similar plugins?

Is anyone dialing back on grit/disto in your mix and arrangement density in your productions compared to the reference tracks?

I want to be clear that this isn't intended as a whine-fest, I know someone is getting more forwards than I am with the same playing field, and I've worked with enough pubs/supes and had enough syncs to know that this game isn't always going to feel 'fair', the only good strategy is to make adjustments and keep moving...

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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by ochaim » Fri Jul 23, 2021 8:43 pm

are you assuming screeners are screening from the artist page players at, presumably, 64kbps and not the uploaded format or have you confirmed this?

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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by hummingbird » Fri Jul 23, 2021 11:25 pm

Hmmm not sure what you mean about TAXI using Soundcloud. TAXI has its own hosting, and you can upload 320k mp3s or wavs to your TAXI music page for submission.
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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by RyanCo » Sat Jul 24, 2021 7:07 am

ochaim wrote:
Fri Jul 23, 2021 8:43 pm
are you assuming screeners are screening from the artist page players at, presumably, 64kbps and not the uploaded format or have you confirmed this?
I don't know how I could confirm it, but when I render out tracks I have to go down to 64 to get it to sound about the same. It's clearly not 128- it sounds pretty low bit-rate.


My assumption is that they are using the lower bitrate to conserve on storage space, which is understandable to some extent because I'm sure they have a ton of songs to host. But to that point, it seems really unlikely that they are storing two versions of the song.

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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by RyanCo » Sat Jul 24, 2021 7:35 am

hummingbird wrote:
Fri Jul 23, 2021 11:25 pm
Hmmm not sure what you mean about TAXI using Soundcloud. TAXI has its own hosting, and you can upload 320k mp3s or wavs to your TAXI music page for submission.
Actually if you download from your artist page it looks like Amazon is the engine they use, the downloaded file looks like maybe 256kbps and maybe just the preview from the artist page is the low bit rate (clearly it's not 256). Here is some of the info on the downloaded file.

Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz


Just because you upload a wav, certainly doesn't mean it isn't getting encoded on that end.

Which then begs the question if rather the screeners are listening to (and forwarding) the downloaded files, or the low-bitrate versions you get when you just hit play on someones artist page. It seems unlikely the screener would go to the hassle of downloading every file...hopefully the do forward them at better quality, but it's not ideal to have them screened at one and forwarded at another IMO.



I want to reiterate that I'm not trying to 'boo hoo' here in anyway, it's just been my experience that thinking about how submissions get heard is an important part of all this. I sat in Jeff Fenster's office when he was EVP of WMG and pitched some stuff once, and then had him play us some other tracks that he liked at the time (including the og pitch of "Talk Dirty To Me"), it was enlightening. It seemed very clear to me that on top of having tracks that were simply better than mine, Ricky Reed and co also had more experience doing these types of pitches and setting themselves up for the best outcome...

In any case, I've been out of this game for a few years doing the buildout out my new studio and fully expect plenty of rejection and really that's why I signed up for Taxi, to knock the rust off and get some new contacts.

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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by ochaim » Sat Jul 24, 2021 9:40 am

to clarify my question:

have you confirmed screeners use the artist page player to play the lower resolution file for screening instead of the higher resolution file.

the lower resolution is likely to save on bandwidth rather than storage.

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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by Casey H » Sat Jul 24, 2021 10:50 am

AFAIK, Taxi screeners listen to the actual file you uploaded, not the "player" version. This used to be discussed a lot when they had the old website. Hopefully someone from Taxi will come on here and confirm that. :D

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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by hummingbird » Sat Jul 24, 2021 10:55 am

Having been to the Rally, and heard first hand tracks submitted to listings played over a loud soundsystem in a huge ballroom, I think I can say with some confidence, that the sonic quality of submissions played from TAXI's site is anything but 'poor'. If I was getting returns for sounding 'lo fi' I'd take a look at my mixes.
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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by RyanCo » Sat Jul 24, 2021 12:52 pm

ochaim wrote:
Sat Jul 24, 2021 9:40 am
to clarify my question:

have you confirmed screeners use the artist page player to play the lower resolution file for screening instead of the higher resolution file.

the lower resolution is likely to save on bandwidth rather than storage.
Right, it's a good point and I get your question. I have no idea, I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out.

What I would say is that if screeners have the same access that we do, where the only way to hear a hi-fi playback is to actually download it, I would not be surprised if they just listened to the lo-fi streaming version. It's a lot easier.

Also, I'm inclined to wonder how much actual bandwidth is used by peoples taxi artist pages.

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Re: Navigating the poor sound quality of Taxi/Soundcloud

Post by RyanCo » Sat Jul 24, 2021 1:13 pm

hummingbird wrote:
Sat Jul 24, 2021 10:55 am
Having been to the Rally, and heard first hand tracks submitted to listings played over a loud soundsystem in a huge ballroom, I think I can say with some confidence, that the sonic quality of submissions played from TAXI's site is anything but 'poor'. If I was getting returns for sounding 'lo fi' I'd take a look at my mixes.
Well, the playback from the artist page is not hi-fi, or full fidelity...I guess that is the question of rather there is some different portal etc. To have a reasonably decent comparison, you need to hear it before. Hopefully there is a different portal for screeners etc that isn't as low bit-rate.

But sure man, as mentioned in my first post "it may well be the case" that my mix is too low fi. However, the main reference for it was Jessie Reyez "No Sweet" . If you listen to that, it's pretty clearly intentionally lo-fi. The other references on that one were Danger Twins and maybe Sofi Tucker....all of them have some grit to the overall aesthetic.

You can check out the one we do on my page-

https://www.taxi.com/members/conwaysound

It's called "These Colors Don't Run" toward the bottom. The overall feedback I got from the screener was useful, and I'm no at all upset that it didn't get forwarded, but when I listen to it back from the artist page, compared to "No sweat" and then I listen to mine from my computer- I'm a lot more happy about what my track sounds like compared to the ref when it plays from my computer.
Last edited by RyanCo on Sat Jul 24, 2021 1:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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