flac/wav/aiff only rule

[HMage 4]

I think you should relax this a bit.

 

Just make some sort of reward for those who do upload in lossless.

 

For example, if someone uploads mp3, don't recompress, just leave the mp3 download as-is, only rewrite tags.

 

But if someone uploads lossless, make put a "lossless" badge in front of it.

 

If someone uploads ogg or aac, it's up to you if you recompress it to mp3 or not. Not many people know what to do with these, so not giving them mp3 just because of uploader is kinda weird.

 

You can put a warning during upload that lossy aren't good — "You're uploading an .ogg. People will be able to download only in .ogg format without losing quality, please upload in lossless if possible."

[cd_solidsnake 122]

Agree with you, we should put a lossless badge for the ones who upload on lossless. I'd be better if we use only .mp3 and .FLAC though.

 

And now, offtopic: OYG IT IS HMAGE! Sorry, but I love your music and didn't know you were in this herd. So many wins! 

[King 5,625]

This is an excerpt from the Pony FM FAQ...

 

Uploading a lossless file puts a "perfect" copy of your track in Pony.fm's file store, which can be offered up for download on its own for audiophiles who like CD or better-than-CD sound quality, but starting from a lossless original also allows Pony.fm to transcode a song to other lossy formats with only one degree of loss.

This means:

Pony.fm accepts a lossless upload, which is converted to FLAC (if it isn't already FLAC) for storage. This leaves a "perfect," unblemished copy of the track in Pony.fm's file store.

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,520]

This has come up before, and the reasons for the lossless-only restriction can be found in the Pony.fm FAQ. The uploads are larger and take a bit longer, but they only have to be done once per track, and the benefits of having archive-quality files on Pony.fm are quite significant.

 

@HMage, do you have any specific circumstances that complicate lossless uploads for you?

[HMage 4]

First off, when I pressed "submit feedback" on pony.fm, I didn't expect that a full-blown public topic will be created instead of direct conversation. I've become aware of this topic only after I got an email notification that I was mentioned x.x

 

Now, on the topic of lossless-only. I am having no problems with lossless uploads since I always render wav (my DAW doesn't allow lossy renders, thankfully). I am more concerned about other musicians that use DAW's with direct mp3 export option -- asking them to go back and rerender in wav might be too much of a step and I've already heard some concerns in private conversations about that. It's easier to ignore this site for them than battle with an old project that might not render exactly the same way because of hardware and software changes/upgrades/updates/reinstalls.

 

Until all DAW's magically will disallow rendering directly into lossy formats, this will continue being an issue.

 

Don't forget that sometimes an MP3 can be the only thing left -- projects can be lost in big crash (happened to PinkiePieSwear), synths can be resold (happened to me) and rerender can be no longer available.

 

I wholeheartedly support lossless, don't get me wrong.

 

But please consider the fact that brony musicians aren't the bunch that got their act together of having multiple backups of everything, rendering always in lossless, and keeping lossless copy of their music handy.

 

Bandcamp is in position of denying you source of income if you don't upload in lossless. Pony.fm doesn't have that luxury.

[Freewave 1,145]

That's not a bad argument. Sometimes the original lossless version is lost or a hd crashes and all you have is an mp3 or that's all the artist keeps as they dont know any better. If you allowed an mp3 upload and that doesn't re-encode it and simply allows that same file to be downloaded, you would negate any reasons for someone joining on. I too have heard a few negative remarks on that requirement.

 

I agree lossless is the way to go for the majority as that's a massive perk here...hopefully most people would take full advantage of that,

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,520]

Now, on the topic of lossless-only. I am having no problems with lossless uploads since I always render wav (my DAW doesn't allow lossy renders, thankfully). I am more concerned about other musicians that use DAW's with direct mp3 export option -- asking them to go back and rerender in wav might be too much of a step and I've already heard some concerns in private conversations about that. It's easier to ignore this site for them than battle with an old project that might not render exactly the same way because of hardware and software changes/upgrades/updates/reinstalls.

 

Until all DAW's magically will disallow rendering directly into lossy formats, this will continue being an issue.

 

My main concern with allowing lossy uploads, even as an option: people who have no barriers (other than a few minutes of their time) stopping them from rendering a lossless copy voluntarily forgoing that extra step to put up an archival-quality track on Pony.fm, out of laziness.

 

Yeah, humans are lazy. But officially allowing lossy uploads can and will compromise the integrity of Pony.fm as a true music archive. From my chats with various artists during the alpha, I've seen the lossless requirement come off as an inconvenience to some and an opportunity to others. A few artists who had otherwise never bothered releasing lossless copies of their tracks before did so just for Pony.fm. Had it not been for Pony.fm's lossless restriction, it's extremely possible that lossless copies of some pretty good music would never have made it online.

 

The stronger and larger the Pony.fm community grows, the better the value proposition will be for going through the trouble to prepare a lossless version - there's much more than just free MP3 hosting to the site, after all. Right now, being able to proclaim that each and every track on Pony.fm is available in lossless formats makes for a pretty strong bullet point to a fair number of people who want a place to find and download pony music, and it means that listeners can expect a consistent level of audio quality from the site (an issue that YouTube, for one example, greatly suffers from). People might upload anything from a relatively nice 320 Kbps file to a lousy 96 Kbps one, and it would be rather jarring as a listener to hear "sloshing water" artifacts every now and then around the site.

 

 

Don't forget that sometimes an MP3 can be the only thing left -- projects can be lost in big crash (happened to PinkiePieSwear), synths can be resold (happened to me) and rerender can be no longer available.

 

~~~

 

But please consider the fact that brony musicians aren't the bunch that got their act together of having multiple backups of everything, rendering always in lossless, and keeping lossless copy of their music handy.

 

This is the other side of the coin, and I know from personal experience that it's possible to end up with nothing but a lossy copy of a track (been there, done that; I've been religious with backups ever since). It is in Pony.fm's best interest to have as much music and as many artists on it as possible, and I never intended to exclude the unlucky musicians among us from sharing all their work with Pony.fm's community with a technical restriction that is literally impossible for them to meet.

 

One could convert whatever lossy stuff they have to a lossless format and upload that - it won't increase the audio quality, but it will open the music up to Pony.fm's community. Understandably, however, that's not really user-friendly; the more steps one has to go through to publish their work, the less likely they are to do it. While it isn't something I endorse, there's nothing that can be done about it, and that's probably a good thing. 

 

---

 

@@Freewave,@@HMage, both of you mention that concerns have been brought up about the lossless restriction in other circles. Could I please ask you to encourage the people you talked to post their thoughts on this thread or contact me directly (my email is feld0@pony.fm)?

 

While the restriction is pretty embroiled in Pony.fm's design philosophy at this time, I'm very much interested in a chance to talk directly to anyone who is actually impacted by it. I can't make any promises on whether lossy uploads will be allowed, but the one thing I don't want to do is act on hearsay. I'm a friendly guy, and am more than happy to discuss the personal circumstances that may discourage or altogether prevent an artist from getting their music onto Pony.fm, and having an open line of communication to them would give me a much better idea of exactly how widespread such issues really are.

[Paianis 488]

Thing is though, what is any artist losing by uploading a lossless file to Pony.FM? Pretty much all DAWs ever created have the ability to bounce to CD-quality wave files, even beyond. It shouldn't cause that much confusion.

 

I must admit though, I've been a bit religious with my file formats. You only need to see the options available on my latest release to see why.

[Dowlphin 459]

Hi! I just stumbled into this topic, but I think I understand what it's about.

 

Educating people is useful. Based on my experiences, just because someone makes music doesn't mean they have much understanding of mastering, thus I'd recommend to make it perfectly clear that when there is a lossless requirement for uploads, people should not convert, for example, their MP3 to FLAC just to meet the requirement.

 

There is a command line tool called "auCDtect" which is very useful for scanning a WAV audio file for MPEG characteristics.

It made me realize that even some commercial CD releases contain tracks that are pure mp3 source.

Also, when someone takes a lossy source and remixes it with barely any alterations of the original signal, saving that in lossless makes little sense either.

 

The whole sound quality thing bothers me as an audiophile a lot, but sometimes there just isn't much one can do, because, for example, some people upload horrible sound quality because their hearing just isn't that good. To them the music they themselves make sounds great, but when people with better hearing listen to it, they might be told it sounds bad.

 

And I hope I'm not going too far off-topic here, but the amount of great music that has been spoiled with clipping through overamplification of the signal is enormous. I always thought this stuff is among the very basics of music production, but the matter seems to be more mushy.

Edited May 4, 2013 by Dowlphin

[Paianis 488]

Couldn't agree more. Just look at the waveforms for some of these classic pony tracks.

 

 

 

 

What people should be doing is following Salslakrits example: At The Winter Gala, which was a big hit back in 2011. I mean, its living proof that you don't need to be loud to get noticed. Compression shouldn't be seen as normal, it should be despised of.

 

Edited May 4, 2013 by Paspie

[ASocialyAwkwardPony 299]

Compression isn't necessary a bad thing as long as it's done with care IMO. One trick is to produce it to get the sound of compression but to turn down the mastervolume by alot to prevent it from clipping. Been doing that for some of my newer tracks (though I am not the best at completely avoiding clipping on intense parts I must admit) and it works pretty well in my ears at least. Also some artists like Nine Inch Nails use the compression and clipping as an artistic statement so there is that.

[Dowlphin 459]

I'm not averse to compression. In some tracks I just don't want great volume changes.

Compression can make a waveform look massively clipped. And it seems detection routines can only suspect clippings, not detect them with certainty. At least what I've seen so far. To be certain, I usually zoom into areas that look extreme and check the tops of the waves. If the program draws the wave outside of the graph, it's not necessarily clipping, just full use of the dynamic. But once three or more samples are on or nearly on the same height, it's quite certainly clipping. And once I detect even one of those, I know that mastering hasn't been done properly.

[DusK 1,264]

This thread kinda veered off-topic a bit. Started off talking about file compression, and ended up somehow moving into dynamic sound compression. That's two completely different kinds of compression, guys.

 

Regardless of what decisions a person makes when mixing or mastering, good or bad, it'll always sound worse if it gets lossy'd twice than what it would be if they had stuck with a lossless format, something that any serious musician would do anyway.

[Paianis 488]

Right, I'm going to get back on topic here. If we are going to stick with lossless, shouldn't we have a mechanism in place so that we can reject fake lossless files that had been created from MP3s? If you go into any spectrum editor you will be able to see where each format cuts off the spectrum at a different point. For instance, MP3s cut off between 16KHz and 20KHz, whereas FLACs/CDs cut off at 22KHz. There should be a mechanism to reject any lossless file where the spectrum cuts off at 20KHz or less. This thread explains it a little bit better than I can.

[ASocialyAwkwardPony 299]

Right, I'm going to get back on topic here. If we are going to stick with lossless, shouldn't we have a mechanism in place so that we can reject fake lossless files that had been created from MP3s? If you go into any spectrum editor you will be able to see where each format cuts off the spectrum at a different point. For instance, MP3s cut off between 16KHz and 20KHz, whereas FLACs/CDs cut off at 22KHz. There should be a mechanism to reject any lossless file where the spectrum cuts off at 20KHz or less. This thread explains it a little bit better than I can.

 

I think if someone end up having to convert their MP3 to WAV it's most likely due to not having WAV's available due to data loss or such, so not so sure this will be the best idea.

Edited May 30, 2013 by Nightmare Lyre

[Paianis 488]

I think if someone end up having to convert their MP3 to WAV it's most likely due to not having WAV's available due to data loss or such, so not so sure this will be the best idea.

Assuming we're talking about new music here, that is the fault of the end user, not Pony.FM's.

 

I think in time we can expand to include an 'archive' section, where we can obtain pure lossless copies of classic pony music from 2011/2012 where we can, though unfortunately some of it will have to be MP3 only.

[Dowlphin 459]

Personally I'd say include a short but clear acknowledgement screen that informs the uploader that lossy music should ONLY be uploaded if no lossless source is available and that in that case lossy should not be converted to and uploaded as lossless.

Information policy is the best policy long-term.

Edited May 30, 2013 by Dowlphin

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,520]

Right, I'm going to get back on topic here. If we are going to stick with lossless, shouldn't we have a mechanism in place so that we can reject fake lossless files that had been created from MP3s? If you go into any spectrum editor you will be able to see where each format cuts off the spectrum at a different point. For instance, MP3s cut off between 16KHz and 20KHz, whereas FLACs/CDs cut off at 22KHz. There should be a mechanism to reject any lossless file where the spectrum cuts off at 20KHz or less. This thread explains it a little bit better than I can.

 

It's possible for legitimate lossless audio to exist that doesn't head into that range, and the thread linked goes into how there doesn't seem to be a foolproof algorithm to determine whether a file is truly lossless or not.

 

If someone wants to put a lossy file on Pony.fm badly enough that they're willing to convert it to a lossless format just to pass it through, I think it's reasonable to quietly let it in. Actively attempting to sniff out and reject such files is a good idea, but all things considered, I don't think it's "right" for Pony.fm to go nearly that far in enforcing lossless uploads.