Serious audiophile’s have used programs like audacity to check their music for distinctive lossy artifacts. Amazing how many Flac files are actually cheap ass mp3’s that were converted. Tsk Tsk. What they’ve done is take a 7mb mp3 and turn it into a 22mb Flac with inferior sound. Wasting a lot of space.
I never took the time to learn how to check for lossy artifacts. Now I don’t have too. Audiochecker is free and does the work for you.
If you’re willing to use triple the disk space for Flac then it helps to know they aren’t converted mp3’s.
Have you actually downloaded this software? The article is more than two years old and the link went to a parked domain. A dead site.
I have a need for software like this and have tried similar products. The last attempt only analyzed files on CD-Rs, which wasn’t a lot a help to me. I’d like to verify FLACs before I commit them to disc. I think the product was TAU Analyzer.
I dl it this morning from here. Using the US mirror.
unpack the zip and run achkgui.exe. There’s a dll I copied to the windows\system folder. Not sure if it’s totally necessary. Some programs can find the dll in their own folder.
I virus scanned the dll file and confirmed here that no known threats were out there. Softpedia has a good rep for safe shareware. I’m always extra careful with new software.
Mine runs. I need to dig out a cd to verify. Basically it checks the flacs against the cd. Or that’s my best guess. There’s no English help file.
I do know it works. I’ve seen audiochecker logs in high end music that I have.
My concern is wasted disk space. A Flac rip can easily be 250MB. A double CD 600MB. That adds up quick. I have 90GB in music.
If some joker passes off a 70MB mp3 rip as a 300MB FLAC then he’s costing me serious disk space. I much rather have the mp3 rather than the fake FLAC.
Ripping my CD collection in FLAC wasn’t an easy commitment. The disk space is a major concern. But, long term having the music in a loss less format gives me more flexibility. I’m hoping that I never have to dig out those 600 CD’s again.
Thanks for this, I’ll play with it this weekend. In looking through my music utilities folder for a place to install this, I found that I already have a similar product. Ever have so many programs that you forget what you’ve got? Anyway, I’d used it before but fell out of practice. I just fired it up to look at some FLACS that I downloaded from a blog and it found one MP3 file among fifteen that had supposedly all been ripped from the same CD. So it seems to work.
Yours is probably a better deal. As i said, this one works (it’s free), but the download directory offers a wealth of zip files. Mostly language overlays but there are a few other files that I don’t know how essential they are.
Boy, I never thought of that but now that you point it out it seems very likely that some ‘intellectually challenged’ people might actually do such a thing - and think they had improved things to boot…
Tsk, tsk indeed :smack:
I came here for a different reason though: is there any software that can check ripped audio files for the loud random clicks and hickups (if you see what I mean) that are the result of a bad rip or something gone wrong in the ripping process?
These sounds are absolutely unbearable to listen to and ruin the track completely. A vinyl record scratch is trying on the nerves but that is much worse.
I understand that it’s a pretty tall order for a piece of software to ask it to distinguish these noises from, let’s say, percussion (claves for instance) except for the fact that they are random.