Should myspace compress it's members/users music?

My mp3 sounds great until I load them to myspace page and the quality goes to hell. I'm guessing when you upload the songs to myspace, the files are automatically compressed to meet their "set bandwidth restriction."

I understand this concept but why can't they just reject files that are too big rather then compressing the hell out of them.

What's your view, it's there a way to bypass this?

Patrick/AI

I agree wholeheartedly. It's not like a 6 MB limit for one song is going to make it sound that great to begin with, then Myspace downgrades it even further.

Don't know of any tricks around this, but let's see what other people have to say...

I agree wholeheartedly. It's not like a 6 MB limit for one song is going to make it sound that great to begin with, then Myspace downgrades it even further. Don't know of any tricks around this, but let's see what other people have to say...

I noticed this because of the bad results I was getting when I upload the songs. What pisses me off is they never even mentioned it in their fine print. I'm thinking what the hell is going on here and then finally concluded that they are compressing the hell out of the songs with out even telling you!

Patrick/AI

You may bypass this whole problem by putting a flash MP3 player on your MySpace site so you can stream any MP3 you want. Store the MP3 somewhere else, have the flash MP3 player point to it.

I did this on my MySpace site:

http://www.myspace.com/blueberrybuddha

I'm assuming MySpace does that to save space. It does sound horrible.

I'm glad it isn't just me!

This has been a long running frustration of mine with Myspace, and continues to be. For the longest time, I even had to convert all my files to mono before I uploaded them, because there wound up being so much degradation in the stereo files that they were almost unlistenable. Only recently, I've been able to upload stereo mp3s to my page that no longer sound extremely crappy. Now they only sound moderately crappy. (Possibly because I've been using different software to convert the mp3s. Even so, the difference isn't much.)

It's frustrating because Myspace is sort of like the one place where everybody automatically goes when they want to check out your music, and the first thing they hear of you is something that sounds like crap. Doesn't make the greatest impression.

Installing a flash player on your page is a possible solution, but I'm not sure how effective it is, since most people are conditioned to just go straight to the Myspace player. Including me, I admit.

I've disabled my player and have my flash player set to play on start-up, thus bypassing that issue.

I just uploaded a song to my Myspace the other day, and I'm fairly certain I saw at one point during the process a sentence that said something along the lines of "Now converting the file to our format" (or the like).

It's Myspace. It's free. You guys really expect much out of it?

Nope!

And to answer the question in the subject header: yes, they should do whatever the heck they want to!

Nope! And to answer the question in the subject header: yes, they should do whatever the heck they want to!

Hey what's up Ken? Long time, hope all is going well with you and the family.

Anyway, back to the subject. I disagree with your point because, A. They are not telling people they are going to compress their song files. B. It is because of the people on"myspace" that has enable it to grow and become successful, come one, you are telling me when you have a business entity you are going to say "this is my business I'll do whatever I want?"

I know you did not say that but the truth is even if it's free, why is it free?

You think I would be going to myspace because it's free or because it has some great independent musicians.

I'll end by saying they should tell you this or have it posted so that the people listening to your songs know you didn't do a poor "ass" recording job and it was compress like hell by myspace.

Patrick/AI

Hey Patrick!!

I just don't remember because it's been a while since I posted songs using their MySpace Player...but I know about the additional compression, and the only way I could know about it is if they mentioned it during the process.

And yes, I am saying that if you construct a website, whether it's business or not, you can do whatever you want. If people don't like it, they can go to Facebook or some other site. There's nothing unethical about it. I'm not saying I like the audio. I'm just saying that you cannot dictate how someone else runs their business.

And also, quite frankly, one should be able tell immediately upon listening to *anyone's* song - yours or someone else's - that it's compressed, and then make the decision to 1.) not post your music on MySpace, 2.) take your lumps, 3.) put your music on the MySpace site in some other manner, such as I have done, or 4.) petition them and hope something is done. Anyone who cannot immediately tell that their audio or anyone else's has been degraded should not be recording music in the first place.

Well I could tell that the quality was way different but I didn't know if it was being compressed during upload and so I was thinking maybe I wasn't converting the MP3 properly. But on another note, you'll be surprised as to how many people who don't know the difference between audio and MIDI.

You may know something, I may but a lot may hear a sound and say, why is it that way? The same with Itunes. I don't buy songs I want to hear at full fidelity on Itunes, like say "Sade" because of the file compression. I need the full flavor no extra spices!

Patrick/AI

And all the while Myspace was becoming so successful,

they were using the crappy compression....so it hasn't

seemed to've hurt their success at all eh?

Patrick? if your music can standup despite Myspace's devious compression - then that's it? Surely that's what counts.

MySpace audio is awful! The worst! It almost seems needlessly bad, as if there's an ulterior motive beyond mere file size...

But if you bypass it you are also bypassing the "add" game whereby people can aodrn their pages with your song.

And I now eagerly await blue2blue's impending rant about MySpace's coding and such

Yeah. I noticed the crappy 96kbps-sounding audio quality on M/S as soon as I put my first song up.

Like Ken, I got tired of the crummy sound, not to mention the restriction to four songs, so I put my own player up.

And when Soundclick offered a player you could embed in your M/S or other page, filled with all your tunes in relatively decent 128 kbps (or higher for paid musician-subscribers), I jumped on it.

So now I have a player loaded with my blog/podcast songs as well as another player with my "produced" work on Soundclick.

All on my MySpace page(s).

And, of course, there's nothing to keep you from hanging on to the crappy M/S player even after you've got a decent player in your page.

BTW... I haven't been noticing the crappy coding there as much because I'm not spending any much time there these days. Arguing politics on their new/politics board is simply absurd, now, and that was the main draw for me. I try to answer M/S PMs that come to me but, frankly, there are so many junk bulletins and messages and robo-friends that I just barely bother.

I have 192 MP3s streaming on my MySpace site, so it sounds purty good.

Is MySpace 96 kbps? That's really low. And if it is 96 kbps, it sounds better than I thought it would have!!

Now, if I were going to complain about MySpace, the audio wouldn't be my first complaint. No, it'd be the cluttery pages and how long it takes them to load (if they ever load). I know that this is how people create their pages. I realize that. But it's still part of the MySpace experience. I've had a number of pages "freeze" my browser and other nonsense.

Actually, just a plain, unpimped MySpace page takes a LONG time. Of course, if people put half MB pictures in their "friend messages" (usually hyping some bar show 1/3 of a globe away) or hyping themselves ("Thanks for the add! Now come on over to PimpBoy's Shoes and Cells MySpace page and see all the cool items...) it's going to slow the bloated, badly designed pages even more.

And, yeah, that's pretty much what a quckly encoded 96 kbps mp3 sounds like. 128 kbps ain't much -- but that extra 33% of bandwidth makes a HUGE amount of difference. (Most of the material in my blogcast player is 192kbps.)