As a person studying music production, this can't be done easily without having to mix and then master again. Certainly there could be varying edits of a track, though this is already common practice. The music you hear o the radio, or even Spotify, will usually be mastered differently than what you'll hear on a CD or DVD
You can get away with just mastering the same mix again, most likely. This would be especially true if you employ EBU R128 [0] and other such modern audio engineering practices. I've personally employed automated R128 dynamics matching for the past ten years, in order to output from one stereo PCM source file, a separate dynamically-matched master for each digital distributor's particular LUFS standard. i.e., YouTube's -13 dB LUFS, Tidal & Spotify's -14 dB LUFS, and iTunes' -16dB LUFS.
It'd be cool if there was something akin to Dolby Atmos where you don't deliver a master, but rather individual tracks and associated metadata, such that it can then be mastered on the fly depending on the output equipment.
Many games let you specify the audio output, and then adjusts the mixing accordingly. This would be something similar I guess, but the mixing is probably best done at the streaming provider, to save bandwidth and other resources. (For static content like music it only really has to be done once per output type.)
I'd like something like this, I have a vastly different sound setup at home than on the go, but listen to mostly the same tracks. Most sound pretty good on my home setup, but on the go I often find myself adjusting volume up and down between tracks, despite things like normalization being on.
I think this is one of the things driving the vinyl resurgence. Albums that release on vinyl tend to less alteration to the dynamic range... Ymmv I've not listened to everything out there :-]
The real reason for that is because of the physical limitations of the medium. You have to be very careful when mastering for vinyl that you aren't knocking the stylus out of the groove by making things too loud (especially sudden changes are dangerous). Even for less proactively mastered stuff, if a master is received too loud, the factory will reduce the volume before pressing so that it is playable.
This could still be solved. Streaming services and digital music stores like Spotify and Apple Music could simply allow labels/artists to supply multiple masterings of the same tracks. One would be the default offering; the other would be a 24 bit file mastered with all loudness-optimising compression disabled. Popular music also routinely uses track level compression for artistic reasons and to balance the mix; it would be up to the artist whether or not to pare back any of that. Obviously the artist’s intent should take precedence here.
Then, as an end user, we could choose which we preferred. By default there would be no change in behaviour. Where software updates are available, an the option could be provided to swap between versions at will. For older devices, the streaming service could let the end user choose the high dynamic range version as an account-level default.
Personally I’d want ready access to both versions. When listening to music is the singular activity in a quiet environment, full dynamic range is great. But as soon as I’m not solely focused on music, multitasking or in a noisy environment, I’d actually prefer the compressed version.
24-bit for playback is a waste of space and bandwidth, 16-bit audio has plenty of dynamic range for any kind of music enjoyed by human beings.
In the old days, the recommendation for digital audio was to master for -20 dBFS average, use no compression (or very little) and let any peaks fall where they may in the 20 dB headroom. And nobody complained about the noise floor at ~76 dB below the average level.
I wish everyone would go back to mastering to that spec, instead of slamming everything to 0 dBFS with loads of compression and often clipping on top. Obviously still allowing use of compression for artistic reasons.
24 bits gives you more headroom to work with, making mastering easier. It also quells any concerns about 16 bits being insufficient. As for "waste of space", the simple fact is that we don't have a shortage of space when you're talking about audio files. Hard drives are routinely over 1TB now. Remember, the person you responded to proposed offering the 24-bit version as an optional "audiophile" version of a track, not the default offering. It's not like everyone will want to stream the top-quality version for listening on earbuds.
You’re correct that the file size of audio stopped being relevant many years ago. In a world of Netflix 4K streaming, even the most inefficient audio formats don’t move the needle.
(If it did matter, which it doesn’t, it occurs to me that you could even create a 24 bit file that only contains 18 significant bits [dithered to 18 bits then padded to 24] in such a way that the space was reclaimed by ALAC or FLAC encoding.)
I agree with all of that; I only suggest 24 bits in order to shut up the people who can’t get over the idea of using 16 bits for wide dynamic range content. I just want the better mastering. I don’t care whether it takes extra placebo to make it happen.
The bandwidth consequence would be trivial bordering on nil given that only a small number of albums would ever receive the treatment, and only a small number of end users would choose the option.
