Someone uploaded a lossless rip of the Alundra soundtrack at some torrent site and I want to check if it's a transcode. I'm questioning it because the filesizes are so small compared to other lossless copies. I don't have the software to check for transcodes and I can't trust my ears with my cheap headphones. Can anyone please check for me? Here is a track from the upload.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GDIXKSCT

I don't want to call out the guy who shared this unless I'm absolutely sure this is a transcode. He said he "dusted it off" after not listening to it for a while, meaning he actually is claiming to own the real album. So any help is appreciated.

Cheers

Sounds very good quality wise, after comparing it to the vbr mp3 release and the psf rip, it's a lot better than the psf file and better than the mp3.

I'm just going by ear though and others may disagree with me.

Edit: On second thought, the mp3 and flac sound pretty much the same.

I couldn't notice any subtleties either, but the filesizes just seem a bit off. Ah well, as long as it sounds good I shouldn't complain, but I hope someone can verify if it's truly lossless.

I tested with adobe audition and audiochecker, but the results lead me to say that this is not a lossless format.

From the Audiochecker report file:
Conclusion: This track looks like MPEG with probability 95%. MPEG means a lossy compression of audio/video.
A lossless file would say 'This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%'. CDDA means Compact Disc Digital Audio.


From adobe audition spectral analysis:



Note the cut off line around 15.000 Hz



A real lossless spectral view would be something like this

You can see that there is no cut lines in this file, meaning that there is no loss of data.

Image taken from protium in his lossless thread.


A more detailed tutorial is on protium original post in the lossless thread, under Transcode Detection section.
Thread 62633