Mixing And Mastering For Today's Music Streaming Services
audioXpress|June 2018

In 2015, the world changed as music streaming went from being the biggest delivery vehicle to the highest revenue generator in the music industry. Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, and others have become the dominant way music is consumed and purchased. While mixing and mastering for CD delivery is now a minority interest, there is still very little understanding and only a few tools available to enable those in the industry to take an alternative approach.

Jon Schorah
Mixing And Mastering For Today's Music Streaming Services

“Streamed audio” means data compression. To reduce the vast amounts of data music streaming services deliver (more than 1 billion streams a day), most of them employ data compression techniques (audio codecs). For example, instead of delivering a large, high-quality .wav file, an AAC or Ogg Vorbis file will be used instead. Unfortunately, these codecs are not very good at handling “hot” audio. What may sound great in the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) can be easily distorted when converted to a data-reduced audio stream.

Digital audio reduces the analog waveform to a series of discrete measurements (samples). In between these samples, the analog waveform continues smoothly, so in some cases, the reconstructed waveform can be higher than the sample measurements. This is known as an “intersample peak.” The problem, well known in the TV broadcast industry, is that codecs can’t handle intersample peaks, producing distortion as the waveform is incorrectly reconstructed.

Until recently, the only way for the engineer to monitor this behavior was to export the audio from the DAW, apply a compression codec, and listen to the results. While many music streaming services readily publish the necessary information, there are many codecs to consider, and several use different bit rates in different settings (mobile, desktop, premium, etc.), resulting in an extremely arduous and time consuming set of forensic listening tests for the engineer who is willing to take up the challenge.

This story is from the June 2018 edition of audioXpress.

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