As if the allure of zero advertisements, a massive catalogue of music, and a host of experimental features weren’t already worth the R72/m price of admission, YouTube has cooked up some new ideas that it hopes will sway fence-sitting customers into making the jump to YouTube Premium. One of those is something it calls Premium Lite, sporting a half-baked array of features for a few bucks less. Another is the promise of higher-quality audio.
YouTube turns it up to 11
It’s that last one that’s got us all riled up. As it stands, YouTube’s watchers – regardless of their status as a paying customer or not – are forced to bear with the platform’s streaming standard: 128kbps variable bitrate (48KHz). This goes for everybody, whether they’re watching at 144p or on the other end of the spectrum at 2160p. The audio quality doesn’t change, but a subscription to YouTube Premium could fix that.
YouTube first began experimenting with more advanced audio controls as recently as January, limiting the feature to a small number of music videos on the platform. It wasn’t long before the feature was unceremoniously snatched away from users, but according to a new report from Android Authority, it may be closer to a wider release than was initially thought.
Read More: YouTube’s video quality is crashing out, hard (but a fix is coming)
Spotted in the latest app beta, Android Authority discovered new code strings that hint at ‘user-controlled audio quality options’ and suggest that “YouTube could soon let you choose between different audio bitrates,” the outlet said.
Specifically, the discovered strings point to at least three different audio settings that could be offered in the app:
- Auto – Automatically adjusts audio quality based on internet connection speed.
- Normal – Stick with the current 128kbps variable bitrate standard.
- High – An option offering a higher bitrate, improving clarity.
The jury is still out on whether these settings would appear on all videos offered on YouTube’s expansive platform, or if Google would hold out the feature for specific videos like it did during the experimental tests earlier this year. The unearthed code also mentions that higher-quality audio streaming would result in using up more data, which is to be expected.
