YouTube Music showing incorrect bitrates

[drangedone]

While I'm glad that YouTube Music has been added (my wife is an avid user), it's very obviously showing the wrong bitrates for songs as we all know that YouTube Music doesn't do lossless, let alone hi res.

 

[Burnside]

The only thing “wrong” there is the 129kbps figure which could either just be a display error or rounding. The 24/44.1 refers to the PCM stream in which the 129kbps lossy audio has been decompressed. It doesn’t mean that the audio is lossless, think of rather like a small item in a large Amazon box

 

[drangedone]

Seems like overkill for such compressed files to me.

 

[Burnside]

Seems like overkill for such compressed files to me.

I think you’re missing the point of my response. Maybe thinking about it the other way around would help you better understand - lossless CD 16/44.1 has a bitrate of around 1440kbps. If that is lossy compressed to MP3, in this instance, the bitrate goes down to 128kbps. Compressing audio doesn’t change the 44.1kHz sample rate, and I guess you could say its bit depth is reduced in the compressed file. However when that’s decompressed for onwards processing by your kit, it’s decompressed into a 16 or 24 bit 44.1kHz PCM audio stream. Decompressing the file into that stream doesn’t add any lost info back in though, it’s still a reconstituted lossy stream.

 

[Dan WIND]

I think you’re missing the point of my response. Maybe thinking about it the other way around would help you better understand - lossless CD 16/44.1 has a bitrate of around 1440kbps. If that is lossy compressed to MP3, in this instance, the bitrate goes down to 128kbps. Compressing audio doesn’t change the 44.1kHz sample rate, and I guess you could say its bit depth is reduced in the compressed file. However when that’s decompressed for onwards processing by your kit, it’s decompressed into a 16 or 24 bit 44.1kHz PCM audio stream. Decompressing the file into that stream doesn’t add any lost info back in though, it’s still a reconstituted lossy stream.

Fully agree. There is a lot of confusion around streaming bitrate = how much data is flowing per second, dynamics/frequency = bits/kHz of the PCM audio stream and COmpression/DECompression codecs = smart algorithms that manage to fit as much as possible of the audio stream at the specified bitrate. The mix of hardware and software dealing with this challenge takes the original audio to your ears in various ways that the beneficiary has to identify, select, make a choice and in the end ENJOY as this is the ultimate scope of the whole story.