Uploading Music to YouTube

[Alhuin]

I've recently decided that I want to upload some music to YouTube. I would prefer to maintain as high of quality as possible. The video would simply be a still image of the album cover set to the duration of each related track. What program(s) (preferably free, unless that's not possible) do I need in order to accomplish this?

I've tried searching on Google, and found things like "Windows Movie Maker", "EZVid", "Virtualdub", etc., but none of them say that they can output video files into an HD format. I found a couple users on YouTube and messaged them, but they either didn't answer me, or said they use Mac. So I'm asking here, in the hopes that someone has done this, or something like this, before.

[Buffalobiian]

I just played around with Windows Live Movie Maker, and it seems to do a satisfactory job.

Open program
Load an image
Load a song
Find the option that says "Match to audio" or something to automatically match the video duration to the audio
Save movie as <>

In the saving options you can choose their presets (the HD video preset defaults to 1080p), or you can make your own custom one. You can choose to increase the audio track to 400kbps if you want.

The output is fixed to wmv, which is compatible with youtube. According to this site, youtube will only play back 128kbps aac regardless of video quality, so there's that as your quality cap. The audio files that Windows Movie Maker accepts is a bit limited, but there's always wav, so you can give it a lossless source if you're worried about transcoding too many times. It'll still have to happen twice by the time youtube's done with it.

Here's the test video I did.

Source image |Source audio | output video (before youtube conversion)



edit: actually, listening to all of that now, the final youtube conversion worsened the background noise the most.

[Kraco]

According to this site, youtube will only play back 128kbps aac regardless of video quality, so there's that as your quality cap. The audio files that Windows Movie Maker accepts is a bit limited, but there's always wav, so you can give it a lossless source if you're worried about transcoding too many times. It'll still have to happen twice by the time youtube's done with it.

According to Google you can use quite a bit better audio than that in a 1080p video. That 128kbps is for mono audio!

It would seem to me one should convert the original lossless audio to the intended aac (384 kbps) directly. That way Youtube wouldn't need to transcode it for a second time, with ruinous consequences. Youtube accepts mp4, surprise surprise, so I don't think it ought to be too difficult to put it together. That being said, I have never made a video I'd consider uploading to Youtube, so my expertise is purely of the armchair variety.

[Buffalobiian]

Something like Super should do the trick then. The only problem is turning a picture into a video, in which case you'll still have to use Windows Movie Maker to produce a video track to mux with your audio in Super.

Good to know that youtube will leave your files alone if you conform to their formats, unlike facebook which butchers up every image now, no matter how many times it's been compressed and reuploaded prior.

[Alhuin]

Thanks for the help guys! I downloaded Super and Movie Maker, and I'll see what happens.

Using Super, I noticed that, encoding to AAC, it won't let you choose anything higher than 256kbps. However, if I switch to AC3, it will. The YouTube information link that Kraco provided says to use AAC-LC, but to set the bitrate to 48 or 96. I don't know enough about encoding to know the difference, so I'm going to try what YouTube recommends first.

EDIT: Movie Maker apparently doesn't support AAC files. Guess I'll try AC3 after all.

EDIT 2: That didn't work either. Fuck it, keeping it as a WAV file.

[Buffalobiian]

Thanks for the help guys! I downloaded Super and Movie Maker, and I'll see what happens.

Using Super, I noticed that, encoding to AAC, it won't let you choose anything higher than 256kbps. However, if I switch to AC3, it will. The YouTube information link that Kraco provided says to use AAC-LC, but to set the bitrate to 48 or 96. I don't know enough about encoding to know the difference, so I'm going to try what YouTube recommends first.

48/96KHz is talking about the sampling frequency, that is how many times per second a data point is recorded.

Generally most CDs are 44.1
Movies are 48

You can set the bitrate to 128/192/256/320kbps independantly of the sample rate (44.1/48/88.2/96/192KHz)

Reducing sampling frequencies suck. Converting between frequencies that aren't multiples of each other also sucks. Sometimes you have to deal with it.

It's advisable not to change the sampling frequency of the source material unless you have to.

[Alhuin]

48/96KHz is talking about the sampling frequency.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, like I said, neither of the two encodes worked. I decided to try creating a video file using the lossless (WAV) audio files, and, choosing the output option of "YouTube" (which made it HD), I actually got a really good video. Is it the best quality? I don't know. But it sounds good enough, and for what I'm using it for, it's much better than what is available.

Seriously though, thank you guys. I didn't know where to start, but now that I've played around, I've already made two album's worth of videos! I just have to take my time uploading to YouTube. I tried a few test uploads... same file, multiple times... sometimes it came out as HD, other times it didn't. Not exactly sure how I got different results, but it seems like, if I don't do anything else while the file is uploading, it will come out as HD.