[Kiro]

> since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting

I find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I've never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?

[eCa]

Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it's music where it's done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I'm out. Not sure why exactly, but it's very jarring.

For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.

[opan]

If you have mpv+yt-dlp set up you can fix this with an audio filter to mix to mono.

    mpv --audio-channels=mono 'urlhere'

Somewhat related, I've used

    --vf=lavfi="hflip"

to fix videos which are annoyingly mirrored to avoid copyright. You could also bind these options to keys in mpv to use on the fly. Some videos will only mirror some parts of their footage.

Another fun one I bind in input.conf

    ctrl+shift+r cycle_values video-rotate "90" "180" "270" "0"

Lets me rotate the video. I sometimes also just open a web image in mpv and rotate it like that to avoid tilting my head.

I also have these binds for unbalanced audio, mainly used with 5.1 audio to sound better on headphones or stereo speakers, and the \ bind one seems to make normal stuff slightly louder also, so sometimes I hit it when I don't wanna turn up my speaker knob for one video.

    \ af         toggle lavfi=[dynaudnorm=f=100]

    | af         toggle lavfi=loudnorm

[bananamerica]

That's super complicated lol. Why not use the browser extension or accessibility feature?

[throwing_away]

That's not super complicated.

I have carla running at all times and put all of my system audio through various loopback devices (browser, voice conferencing, and music/system) and then apply varying degrees of compression to them (no surprise sounds, hard limiting to hear quiet people, and bypass -- respectively).

Of course everything goes through an extra limiter at the end to avoid clipping.

I also send the voice conferencing input and output through RNNoise, so I can avoid emitting terrible sounds and avoid hearing them as well.

People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.

The reason for this is that I can change browsers (or games or voice apps) and they all think I'm just using a normal mic and headset, but it's actually like 10 LSP plugins and various routing.

Still doesn't feel that complicated when you do a little bit at a time.

[louis-lau]

Yes, that does seem super complicated compared to the plug and play setup 99.9% of people are using.

[burnished]

So you got velcro shoes too I take it?

[4ggr0]

i love your spirit and it's interesting to read how you handle your sound, but it's almost comical to see someone describe using 10 freaking plugins to handle sound as 'not super complicated' :D

[bananamerica]

> People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.

Instead of digitally recreating your voice so people like you more, have you considered getting some psychotherapy? Maybe? :/

[lovich]

What are these tools? That sounds super useful for the most annoying YouTube flaws I run into

[throwing_away]

* https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv

* https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

* https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink

* https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitch_5/

* https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

Did I miss any, chat?

[justinc8687]

https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube Is great for chromecasts and other google tv boxes. Basically newpipe, but in a tv format.

[efreak]

If you want to use sponsorblock with newpipe, use the tubular fork instead https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

[Daneel_]

If you're on Windows 10+ then there's a mono audio toggle in the Windows accessibility settings. I use it all the time to fix this exact issue.

[louis-lau]

Also in any other major OS afaik. It's a standard accessibility feature.

[DavidPiper]

As someone with minor but noticeable hearing issues, the reason it's so jarring is because our brain's audio processing center depends on both ears for understanding human speech.

If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.

[gerdesj]

>> Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.

That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.

I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.

Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)

"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over."

This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...

[DavidPiper]

"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side."

This is personal experience, but it is the personal experience of my specialist telling me. [1] is some less anecdotal information on the subject. My use of the term "game over" was specifically for audible speech interpretation.

Lip reading is indeed something I'll probably need to get better at into my mid-30s and beyond as things continue to degrade. My hearing loss is low-frequency-first (Meniere's Disease [2]).

[1] https://www.cochlear.com/au/en/home/diagnosis-and-treatment/...

[2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/menieres-dise...

[gerdesj]

I was diagnosed with "glue ear" as a young child, which I don't think any doctor admits to these days! I had two lots of grommet related operations which involved inserting tiny plastic hollow cylinders into my eustachian tubes, to try and widen them. After a couple of years they were removed by a doctor with a sort of hooked probe. So two lots of treatment spanning around six years. That was in the seventies.

I remember being put into a sound proof booth and wearing headphones and being played pure tones from a generator and being told to press a button when I heard the tones. With hindsight, tinnitus would have played merry hell with those tests, especially at the frequencies they seemed to concentrate on. Yes, my memory is fine!

Did the treatment help? Probably not. I recall what the sounds of tinnitus were as a very young child and they are same now.

Since around aged 45 (I'm 53 now) I have experienced brief spinning/dizzy spells. I find them quite easy to counter. I first noticed them whilst wearing skis which was a bit disconcerting.

Having read up on your link to "Meniere's Disease" - that's probably what I ... have, for want of a better word. However, the dizzy spells for me are transitory and not certainly not minutes or hours.

I gave up smoking around six years ago after 30 odd years tabbing. That probably doesn't help either.

My point is that your faculties are very complicated and the science is somewhat lacking. Putting a name to a basket of symptoms may not even be helpful in our case. I am a (was) a really good swimmer but diving below around two metres deep used to really hurt unless I gently worked down and popped my ears.

In the end I think I have mild symptoms compared to many but I don't have many people to compare notes with. What becomes normal over years and decades hides a lot of things.

Based on my personal experience, you will automatically get better at lip reading or deducing what is going on via body language etc. I also have to wear glasses ...

Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you find a way to live with whatever conditions you have. We have a surprisingly impressive array of sensors and back end processing gear. The eyes are amazing in being able to scan a scene with a tiny aperture and the brain to stitch together a very accurate scenario of what is where and doing what. Touch and all the rest are available, all the time. The next time you catch a ball, pick up a pen, kiss the missus/husband or whatever, remind yourself of how amazing that is, and you are.

[hrnnnnnn]

There's a small YouTube creator who has uploaded videos with the narration hard panned. I told him about it in the comments, he went "hmm that's weird", then uploaded more videos with the same issue.

I don't watch that channel any more.

[jeffhuys]

I totally agree, I will not watch a video with any issues like these.

However, I also hate knowing that I'm hearing mono audio where stereo could be used. 99% of the videos I watch don't have panning issues, so to just turn off ALL stereo seems like such overkill to me...

[slazaro]

In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it (differences in timing and volume inform your brain on the sound source location). Exception being if it's something really quiet right next to one ear, but that's relatively rare.

So when things are mixed "improperly" (it's subjective), it's very distracting to me. I don't need to force mono everywhere, but it's very common in amateurish channels, and surprisingly also in movies and TV shows. Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side. Like, somebody speaking to the left of the camera, and it comes 100% on the left channel and 0% on the right one. It's so unnatural and annoying to me.

[Marsymars]

> Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side.

I find this genuinely baffling; I lived for nearly a decade as a bachelor in a basement apartment where I had a big TV setup, but out of respect for my upstairs landlord listened to nearly everything on wireless stereo headphones, and I can’t recall ever experiencing this.

[louis-lau]

Me neither, I also only use my headphones. I've only had to use mono mode on amateur youtube videos where one of the audio channels is just missing. It has never been an issue on big productions.

Perhaps they're using a weird media player?

[shiroiushi]

>In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it

Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.

[shmeeed]

Is it really possible that there's no driver that is capable of doing this in Windows? Did you look into this?

I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?

[shiroiushi]

I haven't looked into it, no (and certainly not on Windows!). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's already readily available software that does exactly this. Even my phone has a bunch of options for altering the sound, including something called "DTS:X 3D Surround".