Commons talk:Featured sound criteria

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Proposal for audio quality[edit]

Pinging people who have recently contributed to the main COM:FSC page.


@Eatcha and W.carter: Good afternoon, fellow editors. IMHO, the guideline "For modern digital recordings of music, a minimum bitrate of 128 kbps is suggested." seems a bit too vague and promotes the nomination of mediocre-quality content, although COM:FSC aims to feature the best audio files on Wikimedia Commons. Hence, I propose the following audio-quality guidelines instead of the former one:


  1. Disallow the nomination of MP3, AAC, Vorbis (Ogg Vorbis) and other lossy-compression files; they are very lossy and generally have a low bitrate.
  2. Disallow the nomination of video files. Video files should solely be nominated on the COM:FVC page.
  3. Only allow the nomination of files with mainstream uncompressed and lossless compressed audio coding formats, specifically ALAC, FLAC, OGG (Ogg FLAC and OggPCM only), WAV, APL (Monkey's Audio) with a bitrate of 192kbps.


Exceptions: Audio recordings of historical value from pre-Y2K should have a bitrate of at least 96kbps.


― Gerifalte Del Sabana 06:16, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Good morning to you too! ;-) Thanks for the 'ping', unfortunately, I don't have enough knowledge about recording sound and sound formats to be of any use here. --Cart (talk) 06:22, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Pinging recent nominators/voters User:Ikan Kekek, User:AKA MBG, User:MBozorgmehr and User:Yahya Abdal-Aziz --Eatcha (Talk-Page ) 08:02, 13 May 2019 (UTC) [reply]
you can user{{o}} to oppose instead of un-support Eatcha (Talk-Page ) 09:38, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Do you also oppose the 2nd one (Disallow the nomination of video files. Video files should solely be nominated on the COM:FVC page.) -- Eatcha (Talk-Page ) 10:19, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Eatcha: I have read about that application as well. It is based on the software I referred to above, but it apparently detects false-positives 9/10 of the time (according to a post on a HiFi forum). I will test both softwares out when I am able to do so! :-) ― Gerifalte Del Sabana 10:27, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @GerifalteDelSabana: And you can do the exact same thing with a JPG, so that's really not a good argument. I wrote "as long as it has high quality", not "as long as it pretends to have high quality". The question is: where do we draw the line between "decent" and "really good", and is it really impossible for lossy audio to be on the "really good" side of things? --El Grafo (talk) 07:57, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment As a music lover, a musician and an audiophile, I have to insist that MP3 files are to be disallowed for musical audio. MP3 audio files are extremely lossy and cannot properly handle higher bitrates, in comparison with FLAC or WAV files. We are a laughing stock if our "top-quality" featured music files are lossy MP3s. It would be downright disgraceful. ― Gerifalte Del Sabana 15:21, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:50, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Now that we're talking about "musical audio", I have to agree. And indeed for most other purposes as well. What I would like to prevent is that a once-in-a-lifetime recording of an earth-shattering event can not be featured because the only person to witness it only carried a smartphone that defaulted to recording mp3. FP handles that through the not well-documented consensus that sufficient amounts of WOW can potentially trump anything. Maybe we could have a "rules can be broken" kind of thing that requires the nominators to make a statement about why they think that in this specific case a lossy file is acceptable? --El Grafo (talk) 07:57, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I agree but If a file has enough WOW, I won't mind to support it regardless of quality of sound -- Eatcha (Talk-Page ) 10:29, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose 1 and 3 - Something like 10-12 years ago I remember doing a bunch of informal tests of mp3s, flacs, and wavs on high-end audio systems, experimenting with different settings/quality and seeing if people could tell the difference. (This after numerous disagreements). From what I remember (it was indeed a while ago), most (not all) could tell the difference between lossless and mp3 at 128kbps and many at 192 kbps. Once you get up to, say, 320 kbps, though (or V0 VBR), I don't think even the most sensitive ear can actually reliably hear a difference. In other words, barring MP3s entirely is completely unnecessary.
Support 2 as seemingly obvious. — Rhododendrites talk |  15:20, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Oppose 1. Lossy compression does not automatically render a sound unworthy of being featured. As the previous poster mentions, most people can't tell the difference between (technically) excellent and mediocre sound recordings, anyway. And our reasons for featuring a sound (file) are not necessarily, nor even primarily!, because of their technical excellence. Yahya Abdal-Aziz (talk) 13:16, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Support 2. Obviously, a video (file) is not a sound (file), although it usually contains one. However, a Featured Sound might be extracted from a video. Yahya Abdal-Aziz (talk) 13:16, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Oppose 3. For the same reasons as opposing number 1. Yahya Abdal-Aziz (talk) 13:16, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Oppose 1 & 3, modify 2. Maybe for new recordings we can expect lossless, but these would limit us to a very, very small set of files. Or just have everyone converting lossy files into lossless. 2 is largely good, but there's some videos that focus enough on music or sounds that they're basically sound files + Adam Cuerden (talk) 04:07, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Adam Cuerden: I respectfully disagree about your comment regarding point two. Videos are videos. Period. If a video is primarily focused on sounds, it should be converted into a high-quality sound file, instead of being nominated as a video. FVC is the place for that. This is featured sound candidates. Cheerio :) ― Gerifalte Del Sabana 16:35, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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