

Actual music might mask problems in the conversion file (which could be a good thing in real life, though). Why a simple sine sweep? It covers the full frequency spectrum and it's easy to detect distortion or aberations.


Other tests I've done don't show any penalty to the video quality if you upload full quality PCM audio instead of the recommended AAC, so there you go. Apparently YouTube doesn't want uncompressed audio here, which means transcoding is bound to happen. Other formats are clearly accepted even though it's not stated, but the above is the official recommendation. YouTube's own guidelines for other or general material (source: Encoding specifications for music videos - YouTube Help) If you insist on delivering compressed audio the guidelines state:īit rate: 320kbps or higher, 256 kbps accepted Sample rate: 44.1 kHz is recommended, higher rates accepted YouTube's own guidelines for music videosīit depth: 24 bit is recommended, 16 bit accepted There's a lot of confusion about what sample rate to use for YouTube.
