Sound quality after export good - but after putting the file on my MP3-Player strange noises

[Master Mi]

I don't know what might be the reason of this problem.

I have exported a composition in my DAW into an audio file (mp3 - highest qualty 320 kbit/s and as a wma).

After exporting this one it was was absolutely clean - clear sound.

But after putting the file on my MP3 player the file had some crackling noises (always at the same parts).

And after uploading it on youtube it had also some weak but strang noises (sounded like wind blowing over sand or something like that) along the rhythm of the percussion layer I guess - weak but really annoying noise.

On soundcloud there were also some minimal noises along the cymbals - sounded a lil bit washed out and not so clean like in the exported file.

To understand what I'm talking of, here's the uploaded version.

Youtube >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2n3o2_6hgg

Soundcloud >>> https://soundcloud.com/master-mi/lufia-2-tyrant-breaker-master-mi-remix-working-titlemp3

Can't show you the sound on my MP3-Player - but there's a strong crackling right in the beginning.

In the mixer all layers were below the red (even below the yellow) volume level mark.

Any ideas what's wrong there?

[Nabeel Ansari]

Yes, the crackling is called clipping and it's coming from internal workings of your mp3 player. A lot of players come with built-in effects and you might be amplifying your song in the player without knowing it.

Check the equalizer settings, and poke around and see if there are other effects options. My recommendation: turn everything off.

[Moseph]

With Soundcloud/Youtube, the problems are most likely due to the fact that Soundcloud and Youtube both compress the audio so that it can be streamed. They're recompressing your already compressed mp3/wma file, so this might be causing sound quality issues. Export from the DAW as a wav or aif file (44.1 khz, 16-bit), upload that, and see if it sounds better.

The mp3 player issue may be caused by the waveform clipping (it looks from the Soundcloud rendering like you have the level pumped really high). It may not be audible on all speakers/playback devices. Go into your DAW and see where the master track's level peaks in the problem areas -- if it's peaking above 0, it's clipping. There are various ways to address this, but the simplest for testing purposes is to pull the master fader down substantially, export it, and see if you still hear the problem on the mp3 player.

(EDIT: I missed your note about levels, so this might not be the issue. Maybe double-check the master level, though, since it is still possible for that to clip even when none of the individual tracks do.)

Edited June 18, 2014 by Moseph

[Master Mi]

Would you recommend the limiter in this case?

I never wanted to use this tool cause I think that will change the sound quality a lil bit.

So I controlled the whole song with the mixer that there were no layers above volume 0 (below yellow and red level).

Maybe the mp3 player problem has arisen cause I put the track (right after exporting) in the DAW again and turn up the volume cause it was far too silent (but still below the yellow and red markers).

But the strange noises on Youtube couldn't be solved by this - happens with the just once exported version, too.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I never wanted to use this tool cause I think that will change the sound quality a lil bit.

Going off of this and the other thread, I should clear something up with you; plugins don't really change the quality of sound, but rather they just modify the sound itself. Your quality of the audio will still be matched to the internal processing quality of the DAW itself.

Yes, there are poorly designed plug-ins that may do things like sound deterioration as a side effect of a bad way to process audio, but these are every uncommon and certainly not the defaults you find in the DAW.

So anyways, what a limiter does is simply compress down all of the amplitude data that goes above the threshold (set the ceiling to 0 and let it go). This doesn't change the quality of the sound so much as just how it sounds. If you're using a barebones decent limiter, you can have a limiter that does absolutely nothing; the input will be identical to the output, indicative that it does not change the sound quality.

If you have a limiter with a ceiling at 0 and a lot of the audio goes above the threshold, you're going to have a lot of "pumping" in the audio and it'll sound really weird and fatiguing. For this reason, you want to lower the volume before it hits the ceiling, so the ceiling is only catching extraneous peaks.

In old music industry days, they never really like limiters. You would just turn the volume down and mix in a more controlled fashion to keep track of your peaks, RMS, etc. manually. It's more work, but the results are better as you can have as much dynamic range as you want and as little unintended side effect (like pumping) as you want. Nowadays electronic artists just pump limiters as hard as they can and it sounds arguably disgusting.