Freesound Forums

Please listen to this for 20 seconds:
https://freesound.org/people/pulswelle/sounds/321227/
Did you hear the very high pitched squeaky sounds/blips that were clearly out of place?

Now DOWNLOAD the .wav and listen to it again for 20 seconds:
No more squeaky sounds/blips!

I thought there was a problem with my computer or that I was going mad, but my buddy has the exact same results.

Any volunteers to replicate this non-scientific experiment?

This is an acknowledged phenomenon caused by the conversion of the original sound to mpg format that the preview player can decode and use, and to save on server/internet bandwidth. Downloads are direct unaltered copies of the original sound in original format.

Perhaps one day Freesound will be able to tweek the mpg converter so it gives better quality previews at a usable bandwidth.

There are earlier posts in this thread discussing all this in more detail.

Wibby

strangely_gnarled wrote:
There are earlier posts in this thread discussing all this in more detail.

Here is an explanation by frederic:

frederic.font wrote:
When you listen to the sounds before downloading (on the site), you're listening to mp3 or ogg previews of the sounds encoded in relatively low bit rates to save bandwidth. No (dynamics) compression is applied at all out of that that the mp3 or ogg encoder itself might add (which should be minimal or none).

When you download the sound you get the exact same original file that was uploaded, no transcoding nor any kind of editing at all.

From: https://freesound.org/forum/bug-reports-errors-and-feature-requests/38610/

That explains everything, thanks for answering.