Less Is More: Why Audio on SoundCloud Looks Different | Hacker News Reader

Less Is More: Why Audio on SoundCloud Looks Different

developers.soundcloud.com

28 points131713 comments

I've been sharing music on SoundCloud for a decade and I am genuinely interested in this topic, but I cannot stand how strongly this post reeks of LLM writing. Do people releasing this kind of content not notice all the clichés?

They don't care. They think the point is quantity and they don't even know what the word "quality" means.

They know what quality means, but it takes effort and while the majority let them get away with “meh, it'll do” or worse they'll not need to make that effort.

Heck, they probably don't care if the majority look in, see the slop, and nope out after a couple of paragraphs or less. By that time the ad impressions have been counted. That is what it is really about, not quantity (well, not directly, though that is the least effort route to more impressions) nor quality. Ad-tech is the target audience.

Worse than that is the fact that the article completely ignores how SoundCloud now is prioritizing the ears of older listeners.

It would be more accurate to say they are prioritizing the ears of the average person, HF hearing starts its decline in our teens. But this is an age old industry standard that had been the standard because of limitations of recording, the mediums, transmission, reproduction, and the quirks of our ears. There has only been a brief period in the history of recording where we really used this range, and during that period we saw a resurgence of the old mediums and a great deal of talk about their "warm" sound, part of that sound being the removal of those high frequencies. It is not an accident that almost no instruments produce much of anything above 16khz, the instruments evolved with how we hear and the fact that most everyone has either decreased sensitivity or no hearing above ~16khz.

I've been using soundcloud also for similarly long, however a few months ago I started to notice the sharp uptick in llm-generated music that killed completely the enjoyment I had out of the site for me.

It started first noticing some similar songs that repeated too often. Songs that I actually liked, so after a while I recognized them and their variation too often. Then noticing some of the tags I was usually listening to were filled just by just one or two artists. Looking at the artists themselves, they're publishing a couple of songs per hour, non-stop. They're also clearly stating that the music is generated in the artist info btw.

Problem is, this destroyed completely the "discoverability" for me. Tags are hijacked by hundreds of similar songs you can't avoid. As soon as somebody likes one of these, "related" also quickly starts to loop.

I found no way to block these. You can block users, but this doesn't prevent their songs being recommended to me. Feedback was, so far, ignored.

I can't possibly think they're not aware of this issue, so I can only assume that so far they're getting something out of it...

I thought the author might just be heavily influenced by the LLM style, but when there are also complete non sequiteurs like

> Low frequencies take very few bits to encode, and you feel them as much as hear them

yeah then it starts to smell pretty bad.

As the years go by I get more and more annoyed by the fact you cannot sort results by upload-time on Soundcloud. Your only time-related option is a filter which makes no guarantee about the order of results.

Pages out of the Google / YouTube playbook

Hop on. I wish I could view stats for individual tracks. Some tracks are impossible to find in my favorites or playlists, but I know they were in heavy rotation for a time.

alt title: Less Is More: Why SoundCloud Low-passes its AAC Transcodings

Or if we want to be slightly more pendantic, why `libfdk_aac` (not SoundCloud per se) defaultly restricts the input's frequency range when encoding.

My guess is that this default surprised SoundCloud, and that this blog post is an attempt to (1) retroactively rationalize missing this difference with a reasonable-sounding explanation, even though it doesn't make sense at 256 kbps, and (2) create something that their support folks can point at when people complain.

Cutoff at 17 kHz is certainly a viable trade-off in lossy audio compression, but calling it an _upgrade_ is pretty controversial, if not dishonest.

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