[philodox]

Hi all,

I just got lent a couple CD's from a friend of mine at work. I got home and saved them as WAV's on my computer and then popped one of them into the Eastsound for a listen. It sounds terrible, constricted soundstage, the bass is wonky. Yuck. The music that _is_ there sounds like it might be interesting, but I'm having a hard time seeing past the flaws. I put on something I am more familiar with [Tori Amos] and am now floating along to her voice.

Anyways, the question is, can I somehow find out if the tracks on the CD were at some time MP3's? Other than my ears that is... I am just trying to confirm that the anomalies I am hearing aren't caused by bad recording. Maybe I will pick up the funk CD he lent me for comparison and see if the original sounds any better.

Thanks,

Jay

 

[Zorander]

Assuming these MP3s were originally low bitrate (i.e. 128kbps), you can use a LAME Frontend to find out. Re-compress the WAV files into MP3s (--alt-preset standard) and see if the resulting files end up having much lower bitrate than the normal 170-192kbps.

 

[AdamWill]

I remember when I used to use Direct Connect for trading bootlegs, a program called analfreq was widely used for this purpose. It just analysed the frequencies present in a recording. MP3 encoding basically kills everything above (IIRC) 16KHz, so it's pretty easy to tell from such an analysis whether the recording was ever compressed to MP3. Maybe google analfreq and see what comes up.

 

[Zweroboi]

There is a tool called Tau Analyzer. http://www.true-audio.com/
I use the lightweight command line utility from these folks, the auCDtect. Don't see a link to it from their site, but you can download it here ftp://www.true-audio.com/auCDtect-0.7-beta.zip. Works just fine.

 

[philodox]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zweroboi There is a tool called Tau Analyzer. http://www.true-audio.com/ I use the lightweight command line utility from these folks, the auCDtect. Don't see a link to it from their site, but you can download it here ftp://www.true-audio.com/auCDtect-0.7-beta.zip. Works just fine.

Great, exactly what I was looking for... thanks guys.