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Topic: Warning: Google Music transcodes ogg vorbis and aac (Read 7687 times) previous topic - next topic
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Warning: Google Music transcodes ogg vorbis and aac

Since Google Music is probably going to be a very popular streaming service soon, I wanted to issue this warning:  Google Music transcodes FLAC, aac, and ogg vorbis uploaded files into mp3. The latter two, which involve lossy to lossy conversions, is of course anathema to the Hydrogen Audio crowd. Even if their resulting mp3 files are set to 320 kbps CBR.

I figured this out the hard way by uploading several albums in Quicktime aac, finding out that they sounded muddy, and redownloading them to my phone in offline mode and checking their properties.

The upload manager doesn't indicate that transcoding is done to these files. So there's still a good reason to keep mp3 copies of your music files around.

... And as far as I can tell, Amazon's cloud service doesn't pull off these shenanigans.

Warning: Google Music transcodes ogg vorbis and aac

Reply #1 –
I can maybe understand transcoding FLAC to mp3 but not arc or ogg. Pretty poor. Thanks for the heads up.

Warning: Google Music transcodes ogg vorbis and aac

Reply #2 –
Quote from: K-Meleon on
Since Google Music is probably going to be a very popular streaming service soon, I wanted to issue this warning:  Google Music transcodes FLAC, aac, and ogg vorbis uploaded files into mp3. The latter two, which involve lossy to lossy conversions, is of course anathema to the Hydrogen Audio crowd. Even if their resulting mp3 files are set to 320 kbps CBR.

This is stated officially in their help section. While I resent Google for not choosing Vorbis over MP3, and VBR over CBR, I can understand they have their reasons. My impression is that they chose it because they know every target device will support MP3, and also most people know what "MP3" is, in contrast to the other formats. Why they chose CBR is beyond me though, the age of broken devices which cannot play VBR files is long past.

Quote from: K-Meleon on
The upload manager doesn't indicate that transcoding is done to these files. So there's still a good reason to keep mp3 copies of your music files around.

Google music is not meant to be a personal backup solution, but rather stores your files out of necessity to allow you to stream your music from any device with access to Google's services. For an online backup solution, you might rather want to look at AudioSafe (link to HA discussion). AudioSafe preserves the integrity of your files.


EDIT: Typos and grammar.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Warning: Google Music transcodes ogg vorbis and aac

Reply #3 –
For shame.
FLAC -2 w/ lossyWAV 1.3.0i -q X -i

Warning: Google Music transcodes ogg vorbis and aac

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Kohlrabi on
While I resent Google for not choosing Vorbis over MP3, and VBR over CBR, ...


Many mp3 decoders still fail at providing only half-way accurate seeking for VBR files without pre-scanning the whole file. When you target streaming use cases, that are supposed to just work w/o fetching the whole file in advance, the choice of CBR isn't that inexplicable.