Why is Soundcloud making only one of my songs sound distorted?

[steakmusic]

Hey people,

I'm wondering if anyone knows why Soundcloud's transcoding process can occasionally mangle certain .wav files while leaving others undamaged (at least not noticeably).

I'm working on a portfolio for my music, and while I've been lucky enough that Soundcloud hasn't distorted any of my other songs, the last song that I've tried to upload continuously sounds grainy and distorted once it's subjected to Soundcloud's bit-reduction process to a 128 kbps MP3. In particular the acoustic guitar on the song sounds super ugly and warbly compared to its punch and crispness on the .wav file.

Could this be because of a more loud, prominent range of frequencies 'tricking' Soundcloud's transcoding process into cutting out the more crucial guitar information, or a build up of high frequencies in the song? I've tried placing a linear phase low pass filter rolling off everything past 14 kHz, and still the distortion remains. And no, the song isn't going over 0 dbfs, it's peak limited at -.1. Any ideas why the sound quality is getting jacked?

Thanks!

 

[Bugz McNair]

I had the same problem with one of my songs, so I took it down and re-uploaded it. It was fine after that. I'm not sure what causes it, but it can be bypassed.

 

[steakmusic]

Unfortunately, I've re-uploaded about 25 to 30 times with no success! Different incarnations of the same song--24-bit WAV, 16-bit dithered WAV, AIFF, FLAC, 320 MP3, 256 MP3, 128 MP3...you can see I've gone kind of overboard and obsessed here. But still no change in sound quality.

I'm just baffled why this of all my tracks--one that isn't even that harmonically rich or complicated, just gets dicked up by Soundcloud's transcoding process (I'm even more baffled why Soundcloud doesn't encode at 320 kbps instead, good lord...).

The one re-upload where I got somewhat better sound was when I soloed out the bass and guitar--in that instance the acoustic seemed far less degraded.