I feel like this program leaves me in doubt and has ruined my life. Bear with me: I am just a happy listener of lossless audio when permittable, but since I got into the nasty habit of putting my flacs in this program, I don't know what is really lossless and what isnt, and I wish I had never opened pandora's audiophile box. I've done checks on scores that had an audiochecker file in the zip, but the file and my own testing don't line up. It seems every lossless score i have has at least some "upsampled" songs, even CDs I personally own. I highly doubt the CDs I own are simply copied with the exact artwork and everything, only to put 10 lossless tracks and 3 upsampled tracks. What would be the point of that? If you were going to scam people, why put a majority, or even any ACTUAL lossless songs on the CD? So, I think lossless audio checker may be faulty. I've been using audacity to check the spectogram profile of the songs LAC flags as upsampled, because I read that if it appears to be cut off above 22khz, it's been tampered with, whereas a true lossless wouldn't have a cutoff. So I did a CD rip of Twister, put them through LAC, and some were flagged as upsampled. Like 2, out of a 18 track album. So, LAC must be shit, right? I mean, it's flagging a CD rip I did with my own two hands. But, I took the two tracks it flagged and looked at spectogram in audacity. THEY WERE CUT OFF AT 22khz WTFBBQ!!!1!!!

Ok, so my question to you forum is a hypothesis I have. I think LAC checks the lossless authenticity much the same way I have been; looking for cutoff frequencies. HOWEVER, this is casting too wide a net, because some songs naturally cut off at a certain level as an inherent part of that particular song. Thus, even a CD that you buy at the store might get several tracks flagged by LAC due to the nature of their recording or instrumentation or mixing. I have no other way to explain why the tracks on CDs I've purchased would appear to not even be lossless. I mean, I haven't done this test with any CDs I've physically bought - only stuff I've bought from discogs or thrift stores. But the question remains - what would be the point of replicating a CD release exactly with packaging and artwork on the CD, only to replace 1/5 of the songs with shitty upsampled lossy pieces of garbage... but the other 4/5 are true lossless. Why not just replace all of them with lossy? I just don't know anymore. I'm scared.

NOTE: The nature of this rant is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I really do want advice on this matter. I'm bewildered at the whole situation and I want to go back to being relatively certain of the quality of my downloads.

Just listen to the music bro

Problem solved

:this:

the question remains - what would be the point of replicating a CD release exactly with packaging and artwork on the CD, only to replace 1/5 of the songs with shitty upsampled lossy pieces of garbage... but the other 4/5 are true lossless. Why not just replace all of them with lossy?

some CD having lossy-source tracks and other lossless/full. but not common, so having many cd like that making probably not right.

best test - can missing parts from audio notice? if listen and sounding good, no problem :)

The bozos who upsample under the moronic assumption that some magical transfiguration occurs in the transcoding process always has me wondering how they ever were allowed to pass kindergarten.

Still, there's this just ripped to lossless…



And the same down-sampled to 288 VBR…



Given the limitations of the technology to retain a record of data loss, visual identification of what is what is often times a crapshoot.

The only way to be absolutely 100% certain that what you are listening to is truly lossless is to own the original commerically-produced disk.

But to the point already made here by others, unless you're planning on doing some kind of digital editing with the music, and as long as it sounds satisfactory to your ears on the equipment that you're using, then what difference does it make?

Is lossless audio checker accurate?

No. It has a chance to say a lossy track is lossless and a chance to say lossless is lossy.
And it's been tested and proven.

LAC shares the same code as TAU's lossless checker: AuCDtect.
But that requires a CD and not wav format. It does have an older CLI utility for using wavs, but it's more "accurate" with CD's.
This being commercial cd's and not CD-Rs. I don't think they intended it to be used by pirates.
With pirates, you never know what someone truly did to a file.
Upscale, edit, save in lossy, convert to lossless, turn it upsidedown.

But even all that doesn't guarantee correct or proper results.

Spectrograms have even proved to be skeptical in the same vein, as mentioned.

Even commercial CD's might have lossy audio.
Or even lossy "looking" audio.
When it comes to scores and classicals, it won't always use the full potential of 44.1kHz, or even 48kHz.
A lot of it can be just very soft or quiet to not need the full range.
I've seen a few commercial scores not need anything at all.

Older content has a chance of being recorded in studios that are limited in hardware, thus cutoff.
You can't account for the whole album. Especially when a pop song is included by a different artist that may be recorded elsewhere.


The Departed various artist soundtrack has one live track from Roger Waters ft. Van Morrison and it's completely cutoff.

Even though it's cutoff, what's great is that they didn't tamper with it to make it "look" lossless or upscale it.

I would not put faith into LAC or other software claiming to detect true lossless.

That's why some sites use ripping logs that depend on the AccuRip database.
Carefully configured rippers can produce nearly bit-exact duplicates of the original CD.
That way, if you discover any upsampling, you can rule out the uploader and blame it on the masters/mixers.

Thanks for all the responses, I will no longer rely on lossless audio checker for verifying lossless content.

Good job gang! We saved a man's life today.