New U2 song: "Ordinary Love"

[Aaron]

When U2.com hosted their own audio streams the bitrate was usually 256 or 320, but unfortunately they seem to have moved to Soundcloud.

I wonder if that isn't due to changes in how Billboard calculates the charts now.  A song now has a streaming component towards it's placement in the Hot 100.  Views on youtube etc. count towards a song's chart position.  Songs streamed from u2.com wouldn't count as that's not a public site.  But soundcloud might be amongst those sites that would count towards charting.  So perhaps this was just because there's an effort to gain some chart traction...

But they have also been uploading old clips on soundcloud, so who knows what they are doing.  Those old clips were also avaialble at u2.com for the most part I think....

[Aaron]

u2.com just posted a new video for "ORDINARY LOVE" - this time for the Paul Epworth video.  And this time the video features actual footage of U2.  It's cut with material filmed for the lyric video, and is by the same directors. I rather like this version. 

It's on u2.com now, but only if you are a paid subscriber.  If you aren't a paid subscriber, give it a little bit and it will probably show up on youtube.

Aaron

[Aaron]

PS I don't think the audio stream here is any better than what was on soundcloud...

[santiago2u]

::: I was able to watch the video, and still haven't renewed my sub. 

 I also like this version, though I'm wonder if that's gonna be the new image of the band...they look like Al Pacino on one of those NYC undercover cop movie.

[Brad]

So, I guess I have to ask...

The version of the new video I was able to capture from U2.com is 960x540. Is there a better version available?

The audio is 100 kbps AAC, so yeah, certainly no better than the SoundCloud stream.

For the record, I did finally renew my subscription right after Christmas. I was waiting for my new credit card billing cycle. 

[Brad]

Never mind, it's on YouTube now. Up to 1080p.

[Brad]

Even on YouTube, the best audio quality available is 128 kbps AAC.

It's a shame we don't have better audio quality for this mix, but it makes me feel better to know that YouTube doesn't re-encode audio at a higher bitrate than the original. Makes me more confident that "This Is" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" were uploaded from lossless or at least high-bitrate lossy sources.

[Aaron]

Even on YouTube, the best audio quality available is 128 kbps AAC.

It's a shame we don't have better audio quality for this mix, but it makes me feel better to know that YouTube doesn't re-encode audio at a higher bitrate than the original. Makes me more confident that "This Is" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" were uploaded from lossless or at least high-bitrate lossy sources.

Did you notice the 256k dash audio stream in webm format?  I think that's ogg vorbis compression, but I haven't dug into it too far.  I may play around this afternoon to see what that was.

I'm loving these U2.com exclusives which are exclusives for less than an hour in most cases. 

[Aaron]

The .webm file is 192kb/s. it is Vorbis audio. VLC seems to have no issues playing it.  Haven't done much else than look up the properties of the file in VLC.

[Brad]

I swear that wasn't there last night. The .webm file is 3.72 MB, as opposed to 3.56 MB for the 128 kbps AAC file, so it must be 192 VBR or something.

Winamp will play it but it doesn't show the bit rate. I'll see if I can figure out how the extract ogg from webm later today.

Man, we are nerds. 

[Brad]

A quick web search says this command will work.

I'll try it later.

Code: [Select]

ffmpeg -i ./input.webm -vn -acodec copy ./output.ogg

[Aaron]

It can be played in newer versions of VLC which also tell me it IS 192. I haven't tried the above. Power outage here so stuck with just the phone!!

[Aaron]

And we may be nerds. - but at least we know we aren't the only ones looking at this stuff!!

[Brad]

So yeah,

Converted to Ogg. Winamp says it's 192 kbps VBR, average bitrate 130 kbps.

[Brad]

More nerd stuff ahead...

You can see pretty definitively here that the Ogg file from YouTube was not encoded from the low-quality SoundCloud MP3.



The top is a frequency spectrogram from the Ogg file and the bottom is from the MP3. The Ogg obviously contains frequencies above 18 kHz while the MP3 has had a lowpass filter applied at around 16 kHz.

The MP3 has also been mixed significantly louder. I'm trying to decide which one sounds better to me.