If you use YouTube to discover and listen to music, you may no longer be bogged down by the insufficient audio quality. YouTube is preparing for updated audio settings which will open up options for high definition audio playback.
Currently, YouTube has a top audio bitrate of 128kbps along with a 48KHz sample rate, which corresponds to CD-like quality of MP3 music. Android Authority spotted references to three audio settings, Auto, Normal, and High, in the source code of the YouTube beta app for Android. While Normal likely corresponds to the existing bitrate, we can expect the High option to allow for higher bitrate and sample rates — presumably at 256kbps and 96 or 192KHz, though the exact values are not specified. Meanwhile, the Auto option will choose the setting based on your network connection.
Moreover, audio quality settings on YouTube will be independent of the video quality. That means, even if your video is running at a low 144p quality, you can still stream high quality audio. This would be ideal for cases when you just want to stream music and don’t have to look at videos.
While the additional audio controls are exciting, there is a big caveat. These settings will only show up for you if you are a YouTube Premium subscriber. Since the Premium subscription also allows you to play YouTube with the screen off, this could be an excellent means to streaming music directly from the YouTube app. That could be another reason to switch to a paid tier, which costs $14 a month for individual users and $23 a month for a family (or any group of people) with up to five members.
Additionally, the audio quality — similar to video quality — will depend on the uploader of the video and is unlikely to upscale for all content — even if Google has the computing power and AI tools to accomplish that easily.
As with other under-development features, the timeline of this release is uncertain. YouTube might even axe it at a later stage, though we don’t see any reason why it should.
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