Youtube quality

[g3nsvrv]

Hi,
When you paste a youtube link and do a split, it uses the highest quality always? or an specific one?

I'm asking because I tried a song but it does not sound that good; I know that you can also work with files. On the same, does support flac/wav?

[thcp]

Good question, thanks for asking! Yes, it already grabs the highest quality audio available for a given video. The download uses yt-dlp's bestaudio selector, which picks the best audio-only stream YouTube offers (usually opus around 160kbps). Nothing downsamples it after that either, the separation step reads that file directly with no transcode in between.

The ceiling here is YouTube's own encode though, not something I can tune on my end. YouTube doesn't serve lossless audio for videos, so if a song "doesn't sound that good," it's most likely something about the source upload itself (loud mastering, a lower quality rip, noise in the original), rather than StemDeck grabbing a lower stream than it could. Sorry that one didn't turn out great!

Good news for local files though: uploading a FLAC or WAV directly preserves full quality since there's no download or transcode step at all. So if you have a better source file for that track, that already works today and should sound noticeably better.

Let me know how it goes!