topic Playback artifacts in Archived content

Playback artifacts

MusicDonkey — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:55:22 GMT

Hi.

I'm unsure if this is the right place for this topic, but I couldn't find any threds for musicians.

Anyway, I'm an artist and am planning on releasing my music on Spotify shortly. At the moment I have some music on Soundcloud and the other day I noticed that one of my tracks got some weird artifacts on one part. I first thought this was due to the normalization, but after normalizing myself and lowering the limiter during mastering and using dithering etc. I still experienced the same problem. I read the following on Soundclouds help section:

"Sometimes our transcoding system can create audio artifacts, as we transcode all tracks to 128 kbps mp3 for streaming playback. Uploading a lossless or high-quality lossy file will usually reduce these to a minimum, but unfortunately there's not much we can do for the handful of individual tracks that are still affected."

The reason why I'm asking this is of course because I don't want to get artifacts on my tracks on Spotify. So my question is, how does the transcoding work when tracks are uploaded to Spotify? Will I still get the same artifacts? Are there any good tips in general on how to eliminate these?

For reference, here is the song I am referring to, artifacts occur at around 1:26 http://soundcloud.com/music-donkey/butterflying

Thanks a bunch,

Sebastian

Re: Playback artifacts

Sam — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:08:36 GMT

Hi Sebastian,

I'm not really in the position to answer this. I would definitely suggest popping an email over to the label team. Just follow this link and fill out the form: http://www.spotify.com/work-with-us/labels-and-artists/label-contact/

They'll get back to you as soon as they can. They're good guys.

Re: Playback artifacts

MusicDonkey — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:13:54 GMT

Ok thanks I'll check it out!

Re: Playback artifacts

David — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:49:24 GMT

Just popping my head in to share my somewhat limited knowledge.

Aggregators generally require a certain standard of audio file to be uploaded to them. Here's an example from one such aggregator that provides content to us -

- WAVE, 16 bit, 44100Hz, Stereo only,
- Windows Media, 'lossless format' only,
- MP3, 320 kbps, CBR format only.

Sometimes some weird stuff does get through the net, but generally artefacts tend not to appear. Resubmission generally solves this, however.

Re: Playback artifacts

MusicDonkey — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:25:01 GMT

Ok I usually use:

AIFF, 24 bit, 44100Hz, Stereo
MP3, 320 kbps

Thought I would be sending the files in as good quality as possible (AIFF) so that shouldn't really be an issue I suppose.

Re: Playback artifacts

MusicDonkey — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:24:45 GMT

I've sent emails twice to the labels contact team and still have not received an answer. How long does it take before they reply?