YouTube Audio Encoding and Its Impact on Quality The representative claimed that 256kbps AAC is equivalent in audio quality to the 320kbps CBR MP3, but YouTube never actually stored or played videos with 320kbps audio stream. In fact, even the best quality audio exclusively available to Premium users, doesn’t get higher than 256kbps AAC. Higher-quality audio available only for YouTube Premium subscribersĪs stated by a YouTube representative, the platform doesn’t stream audio at 320kbps. YouTube currently streams audio with the following specifications:Īvailable as a default setting for all YouTube users Manual change of video resolution doesn’t affect the audio quality but it may slow the Internet connection down. Now the platform automatically selects the bitrate and resolution options based on the device and connection. Unlike it was in the past, the audio bitrate is not affected by the video quality. Video and audio tracks are initially separate and only combined together when played through the YouTube player. Tip : Check out the full list of old YouTube bitrates and resolutions here.įor the past few years and to this day, YouTube has been using a different approach towards streaming. So, 240p videos were streamed at 64kbps MP3, 360p videos at 128kbps AAC, and 720p at 192kbps AAC. A specific bitrate was selected based on its correlation with a resolution option. Previously, in 2013 and earlier, when you played a YouTube video in different video resolutions, you would always get them with varying audio bitrates.

YouTube simply doesn’t store audio in this bitrate, and the platform’s overall audio quality standards are not as high as you would expect.įor those who want to dig deeper into the reasons why YouTube doesn’t stream audio in higher quality, and learn about the bitrates it really provides, we’ve gathered all relevant information on the topic in this article. In short, there is no software or service that can actually extract or download YouTube audio in 320kbps. More specifically, the most popular question is about the possibility to download audio from YouTube in 320kbps bitrate. We often receive inquiries about YouTube audio quality from 4K Video Downloader and 4K YouTube to MP3 users.

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