Why Can’t I Hear Vocals When Playing Music on My Phone?
We have an interesting one in this week’s Tech 911 column. At first glance, this is such a strange problem that I will not even talk about it with a sublime introduction. I’ll let Lifehacker reader Natalie explain – and yes, she titled the subject of her email “YouTube Audio Witchcraft”. That’s how bizarre it is.
She writes:
Don’t know if you’re still answering technical questions, but here’s mine that drives me crazy. I googled and found nothing! Google has failed me!
On a mobile device, this video only plays background music, not audio. Until you put on your headphones … then BAM, the Beatles are singing along with the background music. My teenage brother says this is to fool YouTube’s copyright infringing program, but I thought YouTube’s program was almost omnipotent and INCONVENIENT. YouTube has failed too! What kind of world is coming too?
Can you tell me what’s going on? Some kind of voodoo sound balance?
PS (already checked, singing goes on both the left and right of the headphones.)
First, here is the video in question for you all to listen to and see for yourself.
At first I thought the video sounded strange – as if the vocals had been almost completely pushed out of the mix in favor of classic 1960s guitar rhythms. I think it is the video creator’s fault and it is possible that they made some changes to the audio before uploading to YouTube to avoid its tagging mechanisms.
As for why you only hear the backing tracks of your song when you listen through your device’s speaker, but a fuller song when you plug in your headphones, it’s possible that your device only has one mono speaker. That said, you should still be able to hear vocals – at least I could when I tested this with a single speaker on my PC (which is admittedly very different from what you hear from your smartphone).
Here’s where it gets even crazier. In the video you emailed me – the video I linked above – I can hear (muffled) vocals whether I move to the left or right channel. However, take a look at another YouTube video “Please Mr. Postman” which sounds much better at first glance than your video:
When I only listen to the left track of the stereo mix, I hear nothing but the band – almost no vocals. When I listen to the right track, I hear nothing but vocals, almost no instruments.
Since you linked me to a video that only got around 190K views in your email, but the above is one of the best videos that comes up when searching for a song (2.4M views), I suspect you are actually talking about it . And for some reason, your smartphone only gives you the left channel when you play that song from the speaker.
As for why your device is doing this, I’m not entirely sure. Your smartphone needs to be smart enough to combine a stereo source into one mono output if that’s all it needs to work with. (It’s also possible that one speaker is not working properly if your smartphone has a stereo system, so I would listen to afew other videos to see if this is the case).
You might want to check your device’s accessibility settings to see if Monaural Audio helps you at all (or if you need to adjust the audio balance of your device). Of course, the simplest solution is to choose a different video to watch, or just search for the song on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, etc.
However, this last step will not help you very much if thesong was mixed that way. If your smartphone only plays the left channel of the stereo songs you’re listening to, you’ll have to create your own stereo to mono mix (which is probably more than you want).