[stven007]

Pretty much what the title says. I've heard that there's a program that will help you detect whether the lossless rip is legitimate? If there is, how does it work? 

 

[NiceCans]

I believe the program you seek is called 'audiochecker'

 

[xnor]

These programs can only "guess" if the source was lossless by looking at the spectrum and trying to detect artifacts that are inherent to lossy codecs, e.g. a low pass filter.
 
The simplest way to be 100% sure is to rip and encode CDs yourself, period. There's also AccurateRip which can be used to check if an album was ripped correctly (which checks checksums vs. an online database of user's submissions).

 

[reddragon]

why will people do that anyway? converting lossy to flac doesnt improve the quality of the file but just makes it bigger...

 

[xnor]

Quote:

why will people do that anyway? converting lossy to flac doesnt improve the quality of the file but just makes it bigger...

 
Because they can. A lot of garbage can be found on file sharing sites, including bad rips, transcoded stuff ...

 

[reddragon]

Quote:

 
Because they can. A lot of garbage can be found on file sharing sites, including bad rips, transcoded stuff ...

 
 
then i guess the only safe way is to own the cd and rip it yourself

 

[aQiss]

You can use any audio editor to check the frequency range of the file.
I personally like Wavepad Sound Editor (no advertising intended).
If the highest frequencies of your file are below 20.5 kHz (check out the screenshot, ~ 18.5 kHz), then the file has been previously compressed with some lossy codec.