What program do I use to…

What program do I use to check if a song is truely lossless?

I was looking for a CD I used to have and I found a burned copy of it sitting on my shelf. I have no way of knowing if it is a copy burned from the original CD or MP3s.

It does sound slightly lower quality and when I ripped it back to FLAC, the bitrates are slightly lower… but I need to know for sure.

Thanks,
-Neil

Use Cool Edit Pro v2.1. It’s less resource intensive than Adobe Audition and has all the features you need to test for lossless.

Type "cool edit pro rapidshare" in Google and you’ll find it.

Take a look at this image. First, convert the file or rip the audio track to wav format and open it with Cool Edit Pro. Go to Analyse -> Show Frequency Analysis to bring up the FA window. Play the file, and if there’s any obvious cut off in the red area, the audio file was compressed in some way. The spectral analysis (press the circled icon) is another way to test for lossless.

Thanks a bunch. 🙂

I was able to determine the burned CD was made from MP3s. Sweet. Thanks. 🙂 I could tell the audio quality was lower, but I just needed to be sure. The difference between FLAC and MP3 isn’t phenomenal, but there’s something about FLAC that makes it seem so much better. The perfect clarity just can’t be matched with any kind of lossy encoder.

You may notice that Cool Edit Pro will generate *.pk files by default whenever you open a file. You can disable this by going to Options -> Settings -> Display and uncheck "Save Peak Cache Files".