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Awful Audio Quality ?

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AlphaWaves
84 posts
Joined June 2011
Topic Starter
AlphaWaves
Hi everyone,

Its been a long time i wanted to talk about this.
Today's average connection speed is 12Mbs (see http://www.ookla.com/). And osu! is still using MP3 files; with bitrates from 128kbs to 190kbs.
What an awful quality. Of course, most players wont even notice it, either because they have poor audio-card and headphones, or because they have shitty ears (i mean, lot of people are used to youtube's bad quality and will consider low-bitrate audio as good quality).
But as soon as we have good headphones and a decent audio card, it is like WTF is this quality ?

Lot of maps come with background video. Really ? We are OK to put a 1mbs video onto a map but still use 128kbs audio ? It has no sense ?

Why not allowing MP3 @ 320 kbit/s ? I understand that PCM (common .wav files) format would take too much space (for the server) since it has 1.4Mbs bitrate (44.1Khz x 16 bits), and that FLAC format would need the installation of codec on certain computers.

But MP3 @ 320 kbit/s gives a nearly perfect quality (only a few people can notice differences between mp3.320 and pcm).


Well, that is all. I just feel sad to play with such an awful quality, sometimes I even prefer using an old, bad-quality headphones so it sounds less awful.
What do you think ?
deadbeat
osu! Alumni
9,218 posts
Joined June 2009
deadbeat
i'm pretty sure that this has been discussed to death several times >_<
Darkimmortal
264 posts
Joined May 2008
Darkimmortal
I'm a massive audiophile with fancy headphones, dac, amp, etc and a collection of 99% FLAC, and I still find osu! audio pretty decent. And that's saying something, considering I own extremely flat monitor headphones, where MP3 artifacts would usually drive me insane.

I find you don't notice the low bitrate when a) focusing on the game and b) with the hitsounds. However there are some beatmaps (usually the older Nightcore maps) where the audio is obviously much lower quality than MP3 128kbps and has been clearly ripped from an extremely low quality youtube audio feed. These are what really grind my gears.

Why not allowing MP3 @ 320 kbit/s ? I understand that PCM (common .wav files) format would take too much space (for the server) since it has 1.4Mbs bitrate (44.1Khz x 16 bits), and that FLAC format would need the installation of codec on certain computers.
Space is not the issue (the entire ranked osu! library, in compressed (osz) format, clocks in at around 60GB), bandwidth is the problem.
Last edited by Darkimmortal , edited 1 time in total.
deadbeat
osu! Alumni
9,218 posts
Joined June 2009
deadbeat
t/77441 this should hopefully be enough
AlphaWaves
84 posts
Joined June 2011
Topic Starter
AlphaWaves
Yes i was talking about bandwidth of course. But maps are, by default, being downloaded with their video. As i said, there is a ratio of 10x between video and audio bitrate, but video are allowed while high-bitrate audio are not.

About the "minimum" quality, SD-, SD use the same quality, aswell as HD and FHD. But even, AAC @ 128k is much better than mp3 @ 128k.
I think the real problem is, how people actually get their song. Because taking an AAC 150kbs (HD, FHD on youtube) gives a decent quality, but the fact they NEED to re-encode it to mp3 loses quality.

If you find the quality decent, its fine, but I personnaly dont. Of course it depends of the map, but sometimes it sounds really bad.
For many songs I played and liked very much, i downloaded a better quality file just to listen, and I can tell you differences hear.

About hitsounds, i just dont play with.

EDIT :
Oh, I didnt see this post, since it got locked then forgotten.
So lets wait an admin comes and lock this one too. So that osu! will keep its awful quality ;).
Copyright issues are lies. Just look at some other platforms, like scorehero, with thousands of players-made charts. They never had any problems.
4 years ago I would have understood the bandwidth problem, today I just dont.
When I read Ephemeral answer from other thread, I would have just liked to tell him "dont call yourself audiophile if you dont make differences between mp3 @ 128 and mp3 @ 320 or even mp3 @ 192".
Well.
MillhioreF
Pro Tester
5,004 posts
Joined July 2011
MillhioreF
Someone did a test on the average user here at this very forum, and nobody at all could reliably tell the difference between 192kbps and 320kbps. Only the most hardcore audiophiles would notice or care.

That being said, even if 192kbps is super tinny and sounds awful, it's the highest rankable mp3 because the staff says so. If you really hate it that much, just replace the mp3s in maps you download with your own 320kbps ones. For the moment, it'll work perfectly fine, except that you'll have to change the local offset.
peppy
19,315 posts
Here since the beginning
peppy
192kbit mp3s cannot sound tinny or awful. It is not possible. If they do, the source is bad.

128kbit tracks should not be ranked unless nothing better if available. 320kbit tracks should not be ranked because they are overkill. i've already touched on this in more detail elsewhere in the forum (i'll leave you with the task of searching for that), but you could also just refer to existing studied like this, or search for a double-blind test – someone even made one on this forum.

As a side not, my audio setup made of the highest quality components (think $4-6k range) and I have spend an extensive amount of time testing compression technology myself. I'm pretty confident in the 192kbit decision.

Summary: 128kbit beatmaps should rarely exist. 192kbit beatmaps should sound fine; if they don't it's either a bad source or bad encode. You can point this out in individual map threads and either provide a better copy or hope someone else can. >192kbit will not exist on this service because I strongly believe it is unnecessary and overkill.
Full Tablet
2,543 posts
Joined September 2011
Full Tablet
Even if you can somehow hear a difference between 192kbps and 320kbps, constant 320Kbps is still a waste. It is possible to encode a mp3 file in a way that it decodes exactly like a 320 kbps (data-wise) using variable bit-rate encoding at less average kbps (depending on the song, a Kbps between ~200 and ~320 is required, 280 being average,and more than 295 is very rare).

Encoding video is another issue, since people have much finer vision sense than audition (so, with current encoders, a 1080p video needs a bitrate of about 200 Mbps to make it indistinguishable from ideal quality, assuming 1080p is good enough for the screen size and eye's distance from the screen).
Last edited by Full Tablet , edited 1 time in total.
IppE
IppE

Full Tablet wrote:

Encoding video is another issue, since people have much finer vision sense than audition (so, with current encoders, a 1080p video needs a bps of about 200 MBps to make it indistinguishable from ideal quality, assuming 1080p is good enough for the screen size and eye's distance from the screen).
First off, decide whether you use bits or bytes and stick to it.

Secondly, your encoder is pretty shitty if it needs 1600Mbps (that 200MBps of yours) to be perceptually lossless, seeing as x264 in lossless mode produces bitstreams of about 50-100Mbps depending on source video in question (high motion gameplay video of CS:S ended up being about 89Mbps at 1080p30)

Realistically 10-20Mbps is well enough for a 1080p video to be perceptually lossless at a desired viewing distance if your encoder is any sort of decent.

Plus that has nothing to do with osu! in the first place, since no one in their right mind would even put a 1080p video in a beatmap.

As for the audio thing, sure 192kbps might sound off with some certain sources, but most of the time (especially with the kind of music osu! mostly consists of) it's perfectly fine. If you really want to put quality before anything else you should just stop using MP3 in the first place as its inherently worse than Vorbis which is also supported and also as an added bonus, is open source and licence free.
Full Tablet
2,543 posts
Joined September 2011
Full Tablet

IppE wrote:

Full Tablet wrote:

Encoding video is another issue, since people have much finer vision sense than audition (so, with current encoders, a 1080p video needs a bps of about 200 MBps to make it indistinguishable from ideal quality, assuming 1080p is good enough for the screen size and eye's distance from the screen).
First off, decide whether you use bits or bytes and stick to it.

Secondly, your encoder is pretty shitty if it needs 1600Mbps (that 200MBps of yours) to be perceptually lossless, seeing as x264 in lossless mode produces bitstreams of about 50-100Mbps depending on source video in question (high motion gameplay video of CS:S ended up being about 89Mbps at 1080p30)

Realistically 10-20Mbps is well enough for a 1080p video to be perceptually lossless at a desired viewing distance if your encoder is any sort of decent.

Plus that has nothing to do with osu! in the first place, since no one in their right mind would even put a 1080p video in a beatmap.
I meant 200Mbps (typo). 30fps is definitively worse than 60fps (and also 60fps might be worse than 120fps, but I am not so sure about that).
At 20Mbps some visual artifacts are still visible on most videos.
I said 1080p because it is the most common resolution used when watching high quality videos (also, in a better world, people would be able to put 1080p videos to osu! beatmaps without complications and have perceptually perfect quality, just like 192Kbps for audio is perceptually near perfect most of the time)
peppy
19,315 posts
Here since the beginning
peppy
I'm re-locking this thread because all that needs to be said has, and I dislike encoding wars.
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