[xipix]

Nice analysis, for 1x playback speed. If you're playing back at a different speed, for example, for music practice, YouTube audio is awful.

Why doesn't this huge AV platform use a better audio time stretch algorithm?

[phonon]

I think time stretching is done natively by your browser, not by Youtube at all. I use https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed on sites...allows any media to be stretched. Did you try another browser?

[xipix]

That's no excuse for YouTube because (a) audio processing can be done in JS/WASM and (b) they have the influence to improve browser playbackRate implementations to something better [1].

Besides, their Android and iOS apps do slow music as bad if not worse than on web.

[1] https://bungee.parabolaresearch.com/compare-audio-stretch-te...

[dylan604]

Because this is such a niche use the number of users taking advantage of this "feature" would be so small as to not get anybody a promotion

[Retric]

Changing playback speed is a heavily used feature. They’ve also refined it several times, recently adding 0.05 speed increments not just 0.25.

[perching_aix]

How did you become this convinced that it's some niche, unused feature? I'd go as far as to say it's essential. So many videos, especially of courses, out there that really need that 1.25x playback rate boost.

[bigtones]

Its the browser that does this on the client, not YouTube on the server.

[ajsnigrutin]

Let's be fair, for anything music related, you'll be doing 1x speed... higher than that is usually speech only, where it doesn't matter as much.

[xipix]

If you're learning guitar, drums, piano, trumpet, etc, you'll want to start playing along at about 75% speed then work up until you can play 110% faster than you need to. YouTube's built in audio time stretch makes this a painful exercise.