Update: image via Sonic State
Our friend Jexus, aka WC Olo Garb wrote in to let us know that YouTube has changed their encoding resulting in much lower quality audio. You can read about it on the Wired blog as well as this thread. Alternatives? Vimeo and Sonicstate TV, although the one thing YouTube does have is the community and exposure. You can see how many plays your videos get and you can see where they are coming from. I find it interesting to see how many hits a post here has generated for the video. I've had a number of people recognize the site because of this. Hopefully YouTube will correct the problem and others will build in the public tracking functionality of YouTube. What can you do? Not sure. Just be aware of it and chose your hosting accordingly. You can also chime in on the YouTube thread. If enough people speak out maybe they'll fix the problem. If you run a blog let your readers know.
The problem via Wired in a nutshell:
"Some YouTube users are mounting a growing revolt against the site's new audio scheme, which has degraded the sound quality of clips on the site by running them through an audio processor that wreaks havoc with songs' dynamic range (the variation between loud and soft), diminishing their sound quality.
This is not "compression" as in bit rate or file format, but in the audio engineer sense of the word: the smushing together of various volumes into a smaller dynamic range. This sort of compression doesn't affect slickly-produced, radio-ready music quite as much, since it's already so compressed, but it hurts any music that has been properly produced, and does more damage to nuanced recordings with lots of dynamic range."
