“We hear you, and I swear we’re working on it”: SoundCloud responds to online criticism that its compression algorithm is ‘destroying transients’

It’s highly likely that if you’re a self-releasing artist - or even if you’re just dabbling in music-making - you’ll have a SoundCloud account. For some, releasing their work on SoundCloud is the very final stage. Sharing their delicately arranged and produced work with their cultivated fan-base.

However, in the last few weeks, the quality of the platform’s compression algorithm (AAC) has come under heavy flak. The criticism led to intense discourse, and caused the streaming platform to respond directly.

The story began when German EDM artist and producer Nasko took to X to ask for some insight as to why his latest track upload’s waveform significantly differed from his final mix.

Among the responses, producer Light Shard stated that SoundCloud had switched to the 'AAC LC' codec recently, and high frequencies tended to be the ones that got chopped first. He stated, “I think the best we can do as artists is to provide some way for listeners to find high quality, lossless files or streams. Make it easy to access as an option, and people will gravitate towards their need.”

Digging into it further, Nasko shared an image showing direct comparison of his waveform from four different sources. Firstly there’s the original 16-bit WAV export, the SoundCloud download, a YouTube 1080p download, and a YouTube 144p download.

The comparison, in Nasko’s view, highlighted a smearing of the transients in the SoundCloud example, while YouTube separates the audio from the video file, compressing it differently and seemingly more effectively.

Others responded to Nasko’s comparison with shock and disbelief. "Still find it unbelievable that the world's biggest independent music platform is the one where music sounds the worst" said one user, while another said, "This is just absolutely unacceptable, especially with a platform as popular and broad as SoundCloud."

“Soundcloud audio is cooked, ESPECIALLY for EDM”, stated Nasko. “Transients are integral to this genre and the regular SoundCloud audio has some really bad issues with messing them up.”

He went on to say; “SoundCloud seems to be using a REALLY bad version of a codec called AAC, which absolutely ruins audio quality for free listeners and artists that use soundcloud pro [sic]. SoundCloud needs to see this”

See it they did. SoundCloud directly responded to the discourse with a statement on X that acknowledged that some information was being trimmed due to the rotation of various transcoding algorithms used to compress the audio. SoundCloud said:

“Shoutout to our community for keeping us on our toes! We use different transcoding setups depending on what you upload. They’re for sure not perfectly dialed in. But we're always working on it, testing out new encoders and settings based on your feedback. Right now, we don’t support lossless-to-lossless, so yeah, some info gets lost along the way. But we hear you, and I swear we’re working on it. Stay tuned—more updates are coming.”

Reaction to SoundCloud’s statement has been mixed, but the original highlighter of the problem, Nasko, spoke to MusicTech and gave a further statement; “What I’d like to add to the whole situation is that the sort of ‘outcry’ we managed to generate isn’t necessarily to stomp SoundCloud for its bad audio quality - it’s quite the opposite!"

He went on to say that, "SoundCloud is still relevant for a lot of the electronic scene and as a primarily audio-based platform, we care about the impression it has on regular listeners and fans of the music posted on it. For SoundCloud to continue to be a place for the EDM scene, it needs to at least get the basics right. There are great free audio codecs (like OPUS) that they can look at implementing, but it’s important that they do this right, showing us that they care.”

The lively debate on the subject has caused much commentary across the music production/self-releasing artist space, and we’ll keep our eye on the story as it develops.