“I swear we’re working on it… Innovation is ongoing”: SoundCloud responds to criticisms of “destroying” transients in song uploadsSoundCloud has issued a statement after German producer Nasko publicly criticised the music streaming platform for its audio quality and file compression, causing an outcry from other artists and producers — including those subscribed to SoundCloud Pro.
Nasko urged fans and producers to “stop uploading 48khz WAV” and other high-resolution files to SoundCloud, due to it “destroying [his] transients,” he said in an X post.
“I am so done with this platform!!! ”, he wrote, with a side-by-side comparison of his music’s waveform from four sources: the original 16-bit WAV export, a SoundCloud download, a YouTube 1080p download, and a YouTube 144p download. Nasko’s comparison intends to draw attention to ‘smeared’ transients in the SoundCloud playback version of the track.

Some People pointed out that YOUTUBE decouples Audio from Video so Resolution doesn't impact audio quality.
Here's a comparison between the same Video at AAC 320kbps and AAC 96kbps (lowest quality).
Soundcloud has a serious codec issue. https://t.co/tbgfHLXfB0 pic.twitter.com/T0g69XlPVA
— Nasko (@Naskomusic) February 17, 2025

“Soundcloud audio is cooked, ESPECIALLY for EDM”, continues Nasko. “Transients are integral to this genre and the regular SoundCloud audio has some really bad issues with messing them up.” The track in question is Virtual Riot & Modestep (ft. Frank Zummo) – This Could Be Us (Nasko Remix). You can hear his highlighted moment at 1:42.

The issue, according to Nasko and other users on X, lies in the AAC audio codec SoundCloud uses to process and play tracks hosted on the platform.
“SoundCloud seems to be using a REALLY bad version of a codec called AAC, which absolutely ruins audio quality for free listeners and artists that use SoundCloud Pro,” says Nasko. According to other users and commenters, SoundCloud uses the FFmpeg AAC encoder, which the developer says is known to be “problematic”. This allegedly impacts the quality of audio uploaded to SoundCloud.
“Obviously you should be using Opus if you want high quality audio”, says FFmpeg — a sentiment that Nasko and other users have shared online.

Big companies use our (known problematic) AAC encoder yet none are willing to sponsor improvements https://t.co/NEX3vL7bnL
— FFmpeg (@FFmpeg) February 18, 2025

SoundCloud responded directly to Nasko’s X post, writing: “Shoutout to our community for keeping us on our toes! We use different transcoding setups depending on what you upload. They’re for sure not perfectly dialed in. But we’re always working on it, testing out new encoders and settings based on your feedback. Right now, we don’t support lossless-to-lossless, so yeah, some info gets lost along the way. But we hear you, and I swear we’re working on it. Stay tuned—more updates are coming.”
In a statement to MusicTech, SoundCloud added: “At SoundCloud, we’re always evolving to deliver the best experience for our community of creators and listeners. Innovation is ongoing, and we remain committed to iterating based on feedback, new advancements, and our passion for great sound.”
MusicTech also reached out to Nasko for further comment. The producer said: “What I’d like to add to the whole situation is that the sort of ‘outcry’ we managed to generate isn’t necessarily to stomp SoundCloud for its bad audio quality — it’s quite the opposite! Soundcloud is still relevant for a lot of the electronic scene and as a primarily audio-based platform, we care about the impression it has on regular listeners and fans of the music posted on it. For Soundcloud to continue to be a place for the EDM scene, it needs to at least get the basics right. There are great free audio codecs (like OPUS) that they can look at implementing, but it’s important that they do this right, showing us that they care.”
“They tried this in the past and failed, apparently due to using an older OPUS codec at way lower quality than what they should have used,” Nasko continues. “Now, they have a plethora of people who want better audio quality, which would be a perfect opportunity to do things right this time around. I hope they introduce beta testing for important changes to the platform, like the audio codec they are hopefully working to fix.”
SoundCloud is yet to publicly provide a roadmap of next steps on this issue, but you can keep an eye on its newsroom and on MusicTech for updates.
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