are my shows lossless based?

Started by lacrima mosa, August 04, 2006, 12:07:18

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lacrima mosa

i cleand my cellar and guess what! i found some old cds and tapes from cure concerts...  what i wanna do first is checked if the cds are all lossless based and not mp3... just to convert them to flac and upload for all of you!

i know there was a way to check that on foreverdrowning, but i cant remember how it worked... :roll:

any help?
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Yves28

You can do it using the freeware Audacity (a nice sound editor).

In this soft you choose an extract of a song and tou ask for the spectrum of it. It shows you the distribution of frequencies from (I think) 20 Hz to 20 kHz.

If your sound is from "lossy" source, the higher frequencies (from 16kHz or 18kHz) won't be present. If it is lossless, you will have frequencies present at high frequencies.

Hope this helps !

Just a personnal comment, since human ear can't perceive sounds with frequencies higher than 16kHz and since while aging the human ear loss the capability to perceive high frequency sounds, I am not convinced that we can make the difference by ear between a lossless and a lossy sound.

cult_hero

if the cds are mp3 based maybe they have these annoying little gaps between the tracks?
if someone needs a program to see if it's lossless or not because he cannot hear it...  

btw: many recordings are not worth to be encoded in flac. :roll:

just my opinion...  ;-)

dsanchez

I do agree with Cult Hero. There are many recordings so bad that should be encoded just in mp3. FLAC should be used just for the good ones.

Just my opinion

David.

Quote from: cult_heroif the cds are mp3 based maybe they have these

btw: many recordings are not worth to be encoded in flac. :roll:

just my opinion...  ;-)
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lostflower4

Quote from: Yves28 on August 04, 2006, 14:59:58
If your sound is from "lossy" source, the higher frequencies (from 16kHz or 18kHz) won't be present. If it is lossless, you will have frequencies present at high frequencies

This is generally true about the frequencies missing from 16K and above. But... There are a few exceptions. And perhaps most of all, Audacity is a bad program to use since the vertical range it shows is often too limited to make a proper decision (lots of things look like mp3 when they really aren't). Then you have to consider all the recordings that have been on 32 KHz DAT (which looks almost identical to an mp3 spectrum).

It's true that many people can't hear the extreme high end, but that's only part of the equation of how mp3 works. There's a lot more going on to reduce the file size besides just eliminating high frequencies.

The best free program I know to do the tests is Exact Audio Copy (EAC). I personally prefer to use Adobe Audition (formerly known as Cool Edit Pro). I think Sound Forge also has a pretty good spectrum display.

And definitely look for the migrogaps between tracks. This is a big clue. The problem is that some people are sneaky and actually remove these manually to pass them off as lossless shows.

It's a jungle out there as far as the sourcing of shows goes!


japanesebaby

Quote from: dsanchez on August 04, 2006, 16:23:25
I do agree with Cult Hero. There are many recordings so bad that should be encoded just in mp3. FLAC should be used just for the good ones.

Just my opinion

David.

Quote from: cult_heroif the cds are mp3 based maybe they have these

btw: many recordings are not worth to be encoded in flac. :roll:

just my opinion...  ;-)

i would like to leave the door open for everyone to decide it. sure, there are lots of recordings that aren't really top of the line but still, there might be someone looking for this or that show in lossless. once encoded in mp3/other compressed format and there it goes, it cannot be reversed. it severely limits the trading/sharing value of the show.
encoding in personal uses is totally understandable but sharing is a bit different in my opinion. and no, i don't love crappy sounding hissy old shows and shout hoorays just because they are lossless. sometimes they seem like a waste of space when archived in lossless but still: 
different people have different views and opinions on what is "good enough" to be encoded in flac - so who decides?
the only way to keep this option open for everyone to choose is not to encode in lossy formats, other than for personal uses.

and if someone wished to do a little remastering, maybe just for his/her own purposes: once it's compressed then too late...

just my opinion...
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