Instagram murders my audio quality. Has anyone found a workaround?

edited February 20 in General chat

My NS2 productions sound great right up until I upload them to IG. I've tried reducing output volume, pulling back on the main track limiter, (as much as -2db) reducing render output volume in my video editor...still sounds like crap on Instagram.

Here's a comparison:



What can I do? What am I missing? Has anyone figured out a way around this?


  • edited February 20

    not sure there is something you can do.. Instagram is primary for photos so it's obvious that quality of audio codec they use isn't big, IG is just about "yes, you can put there short video with sound too" - but it's not primary goal of that platform..

    Btw. even Soundcloud sometimes doesn't sound ideal, which is lot bigger issue. In my experience best quality online player is on Bandcamp.

    But you need also hold in mind how are usually users listening your posts on IG. I bet most of them just hit play on their phone and are listening on build-in speaker of iphone - so for them, any difference between SC, IG or even direct wav file playback is far bellow threshold they can hear :-) So in reality in 99% cases those subtle nuances really doesn't matter for your audience ;)

  • I scoured my saved Reddit posts just for you. I saw a post about this once. Take a look here and see if any of this advice helps. Good luck.

  • Dendy and Nomzai, thanks so much for your input. Thanks for digging up that Reddit thread as it was extremely helpful. It contains a youtube tutorial for preserving sound in your IG posts. It looks like the biggest factor that helped was exporting video in the lowest resolution possible. (320x320-360x360) with the video quality stripped down and compressed, it seems to leave the audio virtually intact. Perfect for what I want to do to share my music.

    I'm way happier with my latest post after doing this when comparing it to my previous posts.
    Thanks again!

  • Sounds like they're making a trade-off between the video and audio quality. For a higher-quality video they sacrifice the audio to keep the stream size down, whereas with a lower quality video they can "afford" to keep the higher quality audio. Good to know.

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