Garbage audio quality of mp3 general conference speeches

The downloaded audio I can find for recent general conferences is 32k bitrate mp3, this is garbage quality, disappointing. The prophet's voice is very distorted by the low quality audio, and there are horrible audio artifacts when I play this file.

Older conferences have at least 64k bitrate and sound a little better, for example, download the audio from conference in 1971- it's 64k.

How can I get better quality audio files of general conference?

Steps to recreate this complaint:

1) Navigate a browser to https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... n?lang=eng
2) Click the view downloads (down arrow ) icon on the upper left of the screen
3) On the popup, click "This page (mp3)..."
4) Play back the downloaded file on your device, and examine the file, note the very poor quality and 32k bitrate
5) Repeat steps 1-4 for https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... s?lang=eng ; note the recording of the 50 year old speech at least has 64k bitrate.

I wish I didn't have to work a full time job, I would volunteer to fix this for the church. I would write a script to re-encode the audio files of the speeches so the sound quality is stunning and the file is still relatively small.

I played it on my laptop speakers and it sounded OK using VLC Media player. I don't have a pair of headphones handy.

You might want to try different programs and I'm sure there some variance in how well they work with the file.

As for feedback, since this primarily is user-to-user about all that you will get here is others saying how it sounds to them. You're welcome to use the Feedback link at the bottom of the conference page to let the powers that be know about your experience.

Thanks for reply, Russell. I would like to hear the prophet's voice in the highest audio quality possible.

As suggested, I used the feedback feature of the website to request better quality audio from the church developers.

And here are links to audio files illustrating what I am talking about. Anyone who is interested can play these files. If your ears are good enough, you will hear a bunch of distracting high frequency noise on the church's published mp3 file, this is the audio garbage I am complaining about. I recommend testing with headphones at least as good as wired apple earbud headphones. I can hear significant differences between all four of these files.

It would be fairly easy for the church to either publish a much better quality audio file, or a smaller file that sounds better. The smaller files I made also have some noise, but it is much less than the church's published file:

mp3 downloaded from gospel library, no changes

Downloaded the video from gospel library, then extracted this higher quality audio from it

Reprocessed the audio from the video with open source speex audio tools to make an mp3 that sounds better than what the church published

Used the open source LAME library to create another mp3 that sounds better than what the church published

I used the FFMPEG app on linux to make these files, could share how-to if the church or anyone wants to know.

I believe the administrators of the church website could upgrade all the audio conference download files with a good script and not that much work. If they don't have time I wish I could do the work to make this happen.

(note please let me know if unable to open the links. I tried using the attachment feature of this forum, but it doesn't allow me to upload audio files.)

32kbps is the equivalent of listening to someone through a tin can.

The only reason I can think of for lowering the quality would be to save on the cost of transfers from a CDN. If that's the case, it's probably worth it.

Is there any possibility of having the gospel library app updated with an option to select a higher quality? If the library app defaulted to the lower quality, it would probably be fine. But having the option to hear at a higher quality would be really nice.

I notice the improved audio is running at twice the size/bit rate. It's possible the product manager wanted a lower bit rate to meet the needs of those who live in areas of limited bandwidth.

Personally, the first attempt isn't much better. There's a cackling during parts of the speech I find just as distracting. It seems to be trading one set of artifacts for another.

I really, really wish the conference center would invest in a de-esser. I find the prophet has distracting levels of sibilance. The sound system in one of our chapels makes it even worse. It puts me in a state of cringe when I show conference in that chapel.

The audio I extracted from the video, in my example I saved it in .WAV format. But inside the video, the church actually has it as a 125kb/second compressed AAC audio file.

Yes, the speex audio example does have different artifacts. If I had access to the master file, instead of using the extract from the video, I could make a file even smaller with much less artifacts, that would still retain the tamber and tone of the human voice.

Or, another option would be, if the church could simply publish a higher bitrate file.

Anyway, as you suggested, Russel, I have used the feedback feature of the church website to request higher quality audio, hopefully someone sees and acts on my request.

I did a quick Google search to see if I could find higher-quality audio...it's a shame that it's 2022 and we're still bothering to store and stream audio with a potato bitrate. I was working with some audio from a 2018 conference address and found the low quality rather distracting. I'll do what I can to clean up some of the audio artifacts, but it's time spent on something that would be easily fixed if we could get WAV files.

You don't actually need to extract the audio from the video to play the audio quality from the video. Just play the mp4 in a media player with the video disabled. Some media players have that option (e.g. `mpv --no-video myvideo.mp4`). This essentially makes it usable like an mp3, with a very large filesize.

Or you can just use Audacious to listen to it (which doesn't even play video; it'll play the audio from mp4s, though).

Thanks for your replies, Munaish. I made my initial post too technical. My point is that the audio files on the conference website available for download are garbage quality- very low bitrate. Our church leaders and members deserve much better!

n_tech wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 12:49 pm I made my initial post too technical.

You are newer to the community and haven't made that many posts. You shouldn't fear that posts you make here are "too technical." After all, these are "tech forums" and there are several very technical people who frequent the forums. This is just user-to-user with occasional input from church employees. The technical people may or may not have anything to say about a particular post, and probably don't read all the posts.

n_tech wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 12:49 pm My point is that the audio files on the conference website available for download are garbage quality- very low bitrate. Our church leaders and members deserve much better!

It's possible the low bitrate was for the benefit of people who live in parts of the world with limited bandwidth, or who have to pay for their connection by data usage.

russellhltn wrote:
> [quote=n_tech post_id=238445 time=1672343380 user_id=704767]
> My point is that the audio files on the conference website available for
> download are garbage quality- very low bitrate. Our church leaders and
> members deserve much better!
> [/quote]
>
> It's possible the low bitrate was for the benefit of people who live in
> parts of the world with limited bandwidth, or who have to pay for their
> connection by data usage.

This is a pretty easy fix though. Just allow some sort of toggle in settings in the library app to either download "hi-res" audio or "standard" audio, to be able to give users an option, depending on their bandwidth. It really is borderline unlistenable to me at times.