Why do certain songs on the STJR youtube channel sound way better then they do in-game?

[Annuum3]

I was listening to both acts of greenflower and thought they both sounded amazing and i love listening to them, but when i hear them in-game, I feel emptiness in response to the song and it doesn't feel as lively as it does on youtube. The instruments sound a lot clearer, and gfz2 genuinely sounds like heaven on the channel but sounds a bit watered down in-game.

Ever since I discovered this its been bothering me a lot and I'm wondering why that is, and I'm pretty sure the same thing applies to the other songs I just notice it with gfz the most (its a banger GODDAMN)

 

[DylanDude]

I was listening to both acts of greenflower and thought they both sounded amazing and i love listening to them, but when i hear them in-game, I feel emptiness in response to the song and it doesn't feel as lively as it does on youtube. The instruments sound a lot clearer, and gfz2 genuinely sounds like heaven on the channel but sounds a bit watered down in-game.

Ever since I discovered this its been bothering me a lot and I'm wondering why that is, and I'm pretty sure the same thing applies to the other songs I just notice it with gfz the most (its a banger GODDAMN)

The in-game tracks are compressed to reduce filesize. The Anticipation track is also missing half of its length in-game due to it only playing for a brief period.

 

[Annuum3]

The in-game tracks are compressed to reduce filesize. The Anticipation track is also missing half of its length in-game due to it only playing for a brief period.

I mean, that makes sense to me of course, but it just kind of baffles me a little bit considering how huge mods end up being for the game and how they use a lot of custom tracks. Is it like.. a limitation of the engine?? or was it compressed for our own convenience?

 

[Lliteqiel ꙮ]

The latter, yeah, it's a matter of compression. You can add many-multi-megabyte music for a custom map, but that generally also may mean most of what consists of that mod size-wise that people are downloading from here on the MB or a server with a lotta addons... is just music. I have experience with playing Kart in specific where I can recall once the countdown ends til you began the race for whatever custom map it was, there was a very brief visual "pause" in gameplay before the music played, meaning it was a hefty enough audio file to load to where it's noticeable and telling - some more compression done, even if it could sacrifice a bit of audio quality, would make things have an easier time not just in downloading from servers (and bear in mind people's internets can wildly vary in Mbps, I know there have been times where it felt like my download speeds were as if I was connecting from the Moon), but also to limit the occurrence of what I just mentioned happening in-game. Goes for SRB2 too of course.

 

[SeventhSentinel]

It's compressed because we'd prefer people to be able to download the game in a reasonable amount of time. It also takes nore CPU cycles to load larger music files, so compression helps the game run smoothly.
Music.pk3 is currently around 88MB. That could easily be more than double the size without compression; maybe even half a gigabyte.
The lossless versions of the music are available on srb2.org if you'd like to edit them into an addon you can load to enhance the music quality.

 

[ReddySoop_]

Compressed or not, i cannot hear the difference so i'm cool with the compression (btw i do not use headphones as i do not have any)

 

[Watermelon]

AFAIK, YouTube uses either Opus compression with roughly 128 kb/s (meaning, 128 kilobits (16 kilobyte or 15.625 kibibyte) per one second of audio) or an equivalently-compressed AAC audio. Out of curiousity, I ripped the SRB2 music, and it seems like they're stored in Ogg Vorbis format (Ogg container format + Vorbis-coded audio), most of them seem to have 64 kb/s (8 kilobyte or 7.8125 kibibyte). Opus is the codec which succeeded Vorbis; not only that, but in YouTube it uses twice as much data per one second of audio, as you can see. So the quality is much better in YouTube.
As SeventhSentinel mentioned, the losslessly-compressed version of SRB2's music is on the SRB2 download page if you'd like. (Lossless compression is more like ZIP (but attuned to audio, no pun intended) in that whatever goes inside compressed, when it gets out you get the same thing back, unlike Vorbis and Opus that sacrifice quality to compress even better.)