Testing Bitrate

[Happybottle]

Hey guys, not really sure which forum to put this, I'm going to try this one

I've been buying a lot of used CDs off amazon lately and I can't help but wonder if perhaps some of the people are sending me copies of their original CD, quite possibly at a lower, lossy bitrate. The CDs always look legit but I know a lot of people that do a really good job with disc labels and I'm a paranoid conspiracy theorist soo...

Anyhow, I was curious, if I tell iTunes to rip using Apple Lossless encoder and the CD is actually, let's say, 192kbps will iTunes complain? Will it encode the album at the highest bitrate possible, 192kbps in the example above? I guess more importantly, is there a way I can test the bitrate of the CD before I rip it? I'm sure there's something for that. If so, I am using a Mac so pls keep that in mind when offering suggestions.

Anyhow, thanks for listening to my paranoid delusions and for any fuel you can throw on this fire

[Andrew_WOT]

Google for AudioChecker. Sweet little application which will tell you whether it's 100% CDDA or something else.

[Happybottle]

Originally Posted by Andrew_WOT

Google for AudioChecker. Sweet little application which will tell you whether it's 100% CDDA or something else.

Hey, thanks for the reply.

It appears that AudioChecker is Windows only...is there a Mac equivalent?

[auee]

Doesn't iTunes state the size of the disc to be ripped? If it is small in comparison to others you know are from the factory, say less than 200MB, then wouldn't this indicate that the music is at a lower bit rate? Just my two cents.

[krmathis]

Originally Posted by Happybottle

Anyhow, I was curious, if I tell iTunes to rip using Apple Lossless encoder and the CD is actually, let's say, 192kbps will iTunes complain?

It will not complain, just do as told.

Will it encode the album at the highest bitrate possible, 192kbps in the example above?

No, it will encode at the lowest possible bitrate, in Apple Lossless.
No way for iTunes to detect if the audio data have been previously lossy encoded.

I guess more importantly, is there a way I can test the bitrate of the CD before I rip it?

Audio CD are 1411kbps, and nothing else...

[BradJudy]

You can rip the CD to wav and open it in an audio editor that has a spectral display function and see if there's a high-frequency cut-off that's indicative of most compression. Here's an example of a VBR mp3 using Adobe Audition:



You can see the abrupt cut at ~19.3kHz as compared to this image of the WAV file:



I would be very surprised if you found this to be true, but I have see it on mass-production bootleg CDs.