Bad Quality Audio

[Deleted member 76036]

Where do stations get their music from? For large companies such as iHeart, do they have their own music library in the cloud somewhere and then download locally for playback? The reason that I ask is that I often hear bad audio quality, when good quality uncompressed radio edits are extremely easy to find.

For example, 106.1 Kiss FM in DFW plays a low bitrate version of one of the Rihanna songs (I think it’s S&M). It sounds like a 32 Kbps mp3. However, this isn’t limited to iHeart and I’m not trying to criticize any station or company.

I also hear horrible radio edits every now and then where the swear words are simply reversed and again, the goof radio edits aren’t difficult to find.

Just curious! Thanks! 🙂

 

[radiofan2023]

Some music services send out CDs still but I think that’s less common than it used to be.

 

[TheBigA]

Where do stations get their music from?

There are numerous radio download sites that radio companies subscribe to for music. These sites are run and serviced directly by the labels. The downloads contain all the metadata the stations need for reporting to SoundExchange. They're the same sites the streaming companies use. The companies might download it centrally, and their stations access it, or they can download it locally. Typically if you can see song titles on the station's RDS, it's coming from a local hard drive, not a centralized base. My sense is that if a station is playing one song with a different bitrate, it was a mistake made in when it was saved to the local hard drive.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

newmusicserver, plaympe and allaccess...... and they all have the necessary data and are radio ready, i just download and import them into automation

 

[Deleted member 76036]

Thanks for the replies. Back in the day, the small market radio stations I worked for subscribed to Top Hits USA for new music. I also personally subscribed to Promo Only for a while. Then, we eventually moved to NewMusicServer.

I guess I was just curious if large radio companies like iHeart hosted their own music for their stations. At one time the small market station I worked for subscribed to Chase Cuts for imaging and there was a lot of cool extended intro radio edits. I still have quite a few of those.

Typically if you can see song titles on the station's RDS, it's coming from a local hard drive, not a centralized base.

I configured the RDS for the station I worked for and Artist/Title info was fed into TRE and then to the Inovonics encoder we had. We had 2 sources for Artist/Title info - AudioVault and the satellite receiver for Whitney Allen and Westwood One (we carried this overnight for some time). There were a few other stations in adjacent markets that carried The Big Time with Whitney Allen, but we were the only one that showed Artist/Title info. The tech nerd in me thought that was pretty cool! 😎

 

[TheBigA]

I guess I was just curious if large radio companies like iHeart hosted their own music for their stations.

But the ultimate source is the same place: The record labels.

 

[Deleted member 76036]

But the ultimate source is the same place: The record labels.

That reminds me, I have an entire folder on one of my hard drives of instrumental music of popular songs from the early 2000’s. A friend’s friend interned for MTV back in the day and apparently when they needed something, they would just reach out to the record label and they’d send it over. At the time, it was pretty cool to acquire this massive library of hard-to-find instrumentals. This was probably 20 years ago and I haven’t listened to them in ages. 😝

 

[kevtronics]

Just because it's on CD doesn't necessarily mean you're getting uncompressed audio. Beginning in the late '90s, some promo CDs sent out by the record companies were actually MP3 files burned to CD, instead of a true lossless copy of the song. Even some commercially released albums on CD contain tracks sourced from MP3 files.

 

[yeoldeschool]

Just because it's on CD doesn't necessarily mean you're getting uncompressed audio. Beginning in the late '90s, some promo CDs sent out by the record companies were actually MP3 files burned to CD, instead of a true lossless copy of the song. Even some commercially released albums on CD contain tracks sourced from MP3 files.

I've encountered commercial CD releases with tracks sourced from MP3s several times too. Considering the costs of buying music legitimately (and the years spent by the recording industry shaming the public for using services like Napster), finding out you've paid for CDs made from MP3s can be a real slap across the face -- especially when you can sometimes actually recognize the particular MP3 files they've used as having come from the music piracy scene! (The song "Run With Us" by Lisa Lougheed, which was the title theme to an old, animated Canadian children's series called "The Raccoons," was once unobtanium. It had been briefly available in the 1980s on vinyl before going permanently out of print, and the only bootleg copy circulating online for at least a decade was one of those 128 kbit/s Xing-encoded Napster specials -- the sort where any white noise like tape hiss would be transformed into pure, continuous, slushy MP3 artifacting glitter with pre-echo-laden, watery snares, hi-hats, and sibilants. Well, amusingly, that very Napster MP3, with that highly unique sonic signature, wound up being used for countless 1980s "one hit wonder" compilation CDs that came out over the years featuring that song. I only know this because it happened to be a song I remembered nostalgically from my early childhood, and I would occasionally look around just to see if anyone had finally gotten around to digging up the master tape and putting out a competent CD release somewhere. Alas, for around ten years or more, no one did. Every time a new CD release appeared during that period, there it would be ... that exact same-sounding, crusty old pirated Napster MP3, being passed off as legit wares.)

I really wish the entire professional audio world would simply begin a movement to finally ban the use of lossy audio compression. It is an evil thing that was only considered a necessity when we were all trapped behind dial-up modems and stuck with limited disk storage. Today, the entire world is streaming non-stop HD and 4K video whose bitrates put even uncompressed 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo WAV streaming (1,536 kbit/s) to shame. And FLAC is available to cut even that in half or more (~700 kbit/s). Really, folks. We can now store and stream raw compact disc PCM with only a fraction of the storage and bandwidth resources demanded by the services that now make up most internet traffic; services for which the internet's infrastructure has now become 100% hardened and matured enough to handle. So ... why aren't we?

With universally-available fat data pipes, bottomless local storage, and cloud storage especially, I think the best thing for the industry to do is start removing actual support for lossy formats from all professional playout and stream-encoding products. Otherwise, because of human psychology, this garbage will never go away. It's almost like we're living in an era where there's finally ubiquitous software support for JPEGs and PNGs, yet where everyone continues publishing most photos in the 1987 GIF format out of simple dumb habit -- cursing everyone with 20/20 vision to forever swim in a sea of dithered posterization while being told they're snobs for noticing and wanting better. I'm quite aware that lossy audio can sound excellent, if not nearly transparent, when a skilled person does the encoding with the correct codecs and bitrates. The problem is, cassettes sound excellent too if a skilled person uses type IV metal cassettes and Nakamichi Dragons for recording and playback. But who actually goes out of their way to use all-type IV tapes and track down Nakamichi Dragons these days? Three guys? It's exactly the same with lossy compression. It can sound good, but 99% of the time, the example you're going to be forced to listen to won't. Making it so professional products don't even allow their operators to ingest, store, or output lossy audio is the only way I see of ever getting creatures of habit to stop hurting the rest of our ears and degrading so much music in the process.

 

[radiofan2023]

Never going to happen

 

[yeoldeschool]

But the ultimate source is the same place: The record labels.

That's another thing. The record labels are themselves inconsistent in the quality of what they furnish. This is especially true of music from the analog master tapes era, and the further back in time you go, the more pronounced the effect becomes.

One of the nice things about certain private music sharing communities on the internet is that their members share FLACs only from CDs they've personally ripped, and they welcome duplicate copies of songs as long as they're from different sources. Say you search for an obscure "oh, wow" oldie like "I Live For The Sun" from The Sunrays' "Andrea" album. Up pop 20 independently-ripped copies from 20 different compact discs. The first is from a mid-1980s US CD re-issue of Andrea. The next is from a late 1990s Canadian CD remastering of the album made in limited quantities for concert-goers at some one-time event. The third, some Japanese CD re-issue of Andrea from 1989 on Telarc Records. The fourth? A Germany-Estonia-France CD issue from 1991 on a Polydor Special Products label. The remaining copies are generic compilation album versions put out by labels ranging from Rhino to no-name car wash discount CD bin distributors. You're fascinated, so you download them all ... and then discover an amazing bit of music industry reality. Not one of them sounds the same! Some have various distortions others don't. One appears to accidentally be in mono. All the rest are in stereo, but a few are so narrow, it almost doesn't count. A certain freak copy fades out ten seconds later than all the rest do, revealing more lyrics than anyone knew existed. Another sounds fantastic in every way, but is spoiled in 3 spots by audible tape dropouts because of a dirty tape head during the transfer. A few have poor dynamic range and muffled highs. Half of them have clipped peaks, victims of "loudness war" mastering engineers. And on and on and on.

Eventually, after carefully comparing all the available copies, you find the one that sounds the best, and discard all the rest. And in the process of doing this, song after song, year after year, you end up with a music collection that's actually better sounding than anything you could assemble by buying CDs blindly in stores. Why? Because sadly, the music industry's internal quality controls are really bad. The record labels have vaults scattered all over the planet, and within each one are myriad of different submasters, made by all kinds of people with different levels of hearing, experience, expertise, and grades of equipment from multiple eras. When compilation CDs and album re-issues are being planned and put together by music industry people, or when someone is populating a database system for radio stations to download music from, one never knows exactly who at what label ends up asking which employee at what vault to grab which submaster and digitize it for them using what vintage playback equipment into which DAW being pawed at by which nepotistic A&R executive's summer job-needing, half-deaf nephew. And this chaos, believe it or not, can sometimes result in the best known copy of your favorite obscure oldie being available exclusively from one of those car wash discount bin compilation CDs ... for no reason other than because the right vault employee grabbed the right tape and handed it to the right pony-tailed audiophile guy working in the right tape transfer room with the right tape machines.

There are many stories, especially in the world of oldies stations, of PDs, engineers, and other assorted station personnel "with the ears to hear" going through every known CD and vinyl release of each song they want in their libraries, trying to find the particular ones that sound absolutely top shelf. As I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum, big-budget stations like KRTH in Los Angeles used to do this, sometimes to the point of getting special access to the master tapes for certain songs from which to make their own dubs when none of the publicly-available options sounded "good enough." And it is very frustrating to think, when all those stations inevitably flip formats, and their libraries get discarded, that all the research and knowledge vis-a-vis the best sources for all those songs gets discarded too in the process. What I would give if it could be collectively preserved somewhere online for not just other stations to benefit from, but for the public to benefit from as a whole. Imagine a database site like IMDB but for songs. You put in a song title and an artist, and you get back a list of all known sources with audiophile/radio industry community-crowdsourced quality notes/ratings for each one. Extra bonus points if each source listed were accompanied by a 30 second excerpt, letting you A/B compare the same portion of the song across all those sources to see if your ears agreed with the community consensus.

 

[yeoldeschool]

Never going to happen

They said that about FM going mainstream when AM still ruled the air.

 

[kc4rae]

Our Wide Orbit plants import either MP2 or WAV files. Obviously, we import into the system with 48k 16-bit MSWAV but it doesn't mean that what goes into Audition is sourced from a uncompressed source as I'm finding out while listening to our stream or the FM and HD. I find the offending files sourced from YouTube videos and I usually find the videos they came from. It's bad enough that they are taking a lossy encoded file from YouTube but it's been likely transcoded several or more times before it ended up on YouTube and probably it was a repost from another YouTube video that was already transcoded multiple times. Our stream encoder or HD encoder just tears it up more and it still sounds awful on FM. For some reason, they always find the noisiest file and use that instead of the hundreds of GoldDiscs in the cabinet behind them. Slowly, I've been replacing them with files from my broadcast library. It's a large undertaking with about 2000 songs over 5 categories.

 

[yeoldeschool]

Thanks for defending quality.

Here's a tip. If you or anyone else out there is ever forced to resort to Youtube for unobtanium, the best quality audio can be found by searching using Google thusly:

site:youtube.com "song title here" "artist name here" "provided to youtube by"

It's the latter part that matters. It limits your results exclusively to mass uploads done by automated record label bots. Those bots' uploads are almost always in lossless format, meaning that the m4a- and opus-format audio tracks the resulting Youtube videos have will be first generation lossy -- much superior to some random uploader's questionable five-times transcoded MP3 from the Gnutella era. And while Youtube's servers now offer only 128 kbit/s audio tracks maximum (192 and 256 kbit/s were formerly available), opus at 128 kbit/s sounds approximately like 160 kbit/s AAC and 192 kbit/s MP3 to many people's ears. So in a pinch, record label bot uploads in Opus format can be passable for things you can't find anywhere else.

P.S. In spite of putting that phrase in quotes, sometimes Youtube mixes in irrelevant results. Make sure you actually see something like "Provided to YouTube by BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited" in the Google result's description summary. Another hint that it's a bot upload: the video will consist of a stock still image throughout the song. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ynhU3NUKNk

 

[kevtronics]

Also those record-label-bot channels will always have the channel name listed as "[artist name] - Topic".

But the audio being provided directly by the copyright owner isn't always a guarantee that they'll use the highest-quality copy available. Especially if it's an album that was never officially released in digital form. You excitedly click on the video, thinking "Wow, they finally found the master tape and did a new digital transfer of it!" -- but no, it's just a needledrop from a scratchy copy of the vinyl record, played on a not-very-good turntable. They don't care how good or bad it sounds; they just want to add it into YouTube's Content ID system so they can get the copyright revenue from it.

Or, worse yet, it could be a re-recording! I've seen that quite often, especially from one-hit-wonder artists, and groups which had a revolving door of members, like the Ink Spots and the Drifters.

 

[secondchoice]

Back in final days of vinal, did anyone ever get a Motown record that had tiny pieces label inbeded the record. I was told it occasionally happened when they recycled vinyl from old returned records without removing all of the label.

 

[radiofan2023]

Back in final days of vinal, did anyone ever get a Motown record that had tiny pieces label inbeded the record. I was told it occasionally happened when they recycled vinyl from old returned records without removing all of the label.

I've never heard of that happening with Motown or any other record company. It sounds like an urban legend (no pun intended)

 

[kevtronics]

I've never heard of that happening with Motown or any other record company. It sounds like an urban legend (no pun intended)

I heard it was supposedly a myth as well, until I came across a sealed 1970s LP that was not only incredibly noisy when I opened and played it (it sounded heavily worn even though it was never played before), but it also did have a few little bits of ground-up paper label stuck in the vinyl.

 

[radiofan2023]

Maybe it was a one off.

 

[secondchoice]

I've never heard of that happening with Motown or any other record company. It sounds like an urban legend (no pun intended)

It most likely was before you were born. It happened to me in 1981 or 1982 when AM still had listeners. As long as a record didn't skip it really didn't matter.

BTW I guess you could call Motown a forerunner of urban but IMHO something happened between Motown and what they are playing on the current Urban stations. Motown lyrics were clean and except for some echo there wasn't and lot of recording studio tricks. Differently no sampling. When Motown Acts toured they had real musicians playing behind them. No lip syncing except on TV if then. I think everybody lip synced on Bandstand.