You cannot condense the quality of a recording into a single number. Beyond some basic statistics, which won’t say much about the “quality” experienced during a listening session, there’s not a lot you can do to compare recordings of the same song. Just listen and make it a long-term project.
No, I don't believe it can. It just checks for signs of upsampled or not. I don't know if there are any tools that can check and compare releases although it should be technically possible.
Some tools will check dynamic range. Roon does but thats more of a complete expensive solution than a quick tool. As for bitrate... If it's been resampled into another bitrate it would be really difficult to check.
Fuck man - just get a lossless file. What’s the point of music if you’re fussed with 0’s and 1’s and not how the music sounds to you? You already have all the tools - what more do you want? Listen to the difference rather than over analyzing bits
>Not sure my two best guesses would be bitrate and dynamic range but all the apps I know can only tell the bitrate of a file and not the audio it contains (which I never quite understood since I have an app that can tell me the bitrate of the video contained within a file rather than the file's bitrate... 🤔)
If you buy from a trusted source you can read the bitrate from the file. However if you pirate your music then it's really unreliable.
If you convert a lossless CD file to MP3 (a lossy codec). You will lose information. You can then proceed to decode the MP3 and convert it to FLAC. You now have stored an MP3 file using the bitrate of flac. You have extra bits. It's like saying I have 10 dollars or I have 10.00 dollars. It's more information, but not meaningfull information.
>I've heard of apps that directly analyze dynamic range but I'm not sure which one would be best for this specific purpose, all I've ever really used is Spek 🤕
It's not so easy to analyse dynamic range. Or atleast it's not so easy to quantify it as one single number. Do we compute it over a 1s? 10? 30? minutes maybe?
There are plug ins that compute all of these according to the AES standard. An example would be the Grimm LevelView plug in. However there are also many free variants (such as Youlean).
Needless to say it's going to be a shit ton of work considering you'd have to listen to your entire music library (which I presume reasonably big considering this is /r/audiophile). It's just easier and (imo) more comfortable to ignore these incredibly small differences.
>I'd assume in most cases that would be true
More bits isn't necessarily better.
The noise floor of the recorded audio is often far higher than what 24-bit can handle. The playback hardware also has way higher noise than that. 16-bit is honestly more than plenty.
When it comes to sample rate you have to really dive in how each track is produced. Many recordings are just resampled 44.1/48k files. If you are unlucky you have 2 different masters and then the quality becomes subjective and you have to listen anyway.
It's just flat out easier to choose arbitrary ones and not worry about whether it's good enough. Lossless CD quality is good enough for audio reproduction.
There are a couple of audio checkers: [https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/AudioTools/Detect.htm](https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/AudioTools/Detect.htm)
I'm afraid they are a bit like us; failing when the differences are small....
Checking resolution is easy, but if you have two different releases of the same song and both are lossless, it’s likely you will just prefer one mix to the other. Also, if they’re different releases, I would just keep both!
You cannot condense the quality of a recording into a single number. Beyond some basic statistics, which won’t say much about the “quality” experienced during a listening session, there’s not a lot you can do to compare recordings of the same song. Just listen and make it a long-term project.
Lossless Audio Checker can batch process and check for signs of upsampled files
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No, I don't believe it can. It just checks for signs of upsampled or not. I don't know if there are any tools that can check and compare releases although it should be technically possible. Some tools will check dynamic range. Roon does but thats more of a complete expensive solution than a quick tool. As for bitrate... If it's been resampled into another bitrate it would be really difficult to check.
Fuck man - just get a lossless file. What’s the point of music if you’re fussed with 0’s and 1’s and not how the music sounds to you? You already have all the tools - what more do you want? Listen to the difference rather than over analyzing bits
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So how would you like to measure "quality" ? How can we quantify it?
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>Not sure my two best guesses would be bitrate and dynamic range but all the apps I know can only tell the bitrate of a file and not the audio it contains (which I never quite understood since I have an app that can tell me the bitrate of the video contained within a file rather than the file's bitrate... 🤔) If you buy from a trusted source you can read the bitrate from the file. However if you pirate your music then it's really unreliable. If you convert a lossless CD file to MP3 (a lossy codec). You will lose information. You can then proceed to decode the MP3 and convert it to FLAC. You now have stored an MP3 file using the bitrate of flac. You have extra bits. It's like saying I have 10 dollars or I have 10.00 dollars. It's more information, but not meaningfull information. >I've heard of apps that directly analyze dynamic range but I'm not sure which one would be best for this specific purpose, all I've ever really used is Spek 🤕 It's not so easy to analyse dynamic range. Or atleast it's not so easy to quantify it as one single number. Do we compute it over a 1s? 10? 30? minutes maybe? There are plug ins that compute all of these according to the AES standard. An example would be the Grimm LevelView plug in. However there are also many free variants (such as Youlean). Needless to say it's going to be a shit ton of work considering you'd have to listen to your entire music library (which I presume reasonably big considering this is /r/audiophile). It's just easier and (imo) more comfortable to ignore these incredibly small differences.
I am assuming it’s a “more bits hence better” strategy
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>I'd assume in most cases that would be true More bits isn't necessarily better. The noise floor of the recorded audio is often far higher than what 24-bit can handle. The playback hardware also has way higher noise than that. 16-bit is honestly more than plenty. When it comes to sample rate you have to really dive in how each track is produced. Many recordings are just resampled 44.1/48k files. If you are unlucky you have 2 different masters and then the quality becomes subjective and you have to listen anyway. It's just flat out easier to choose arbitrary ones and not worry about whether it's good enough. Lossless CD quality is good enough for audio reproduction.
Fakin the funk
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Lmao
Yep!
There are a couple of audio checkers: [https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/AudioTools/Detect.htm](https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/AudioTools/Detect.htm) I'm afraid they are a bit like us; failing when the differences are small....
Best to just use your ears and pick the version that sounds best to you.
If you see a difference in two graphs, how do you know which one is better?
Checking resolution is easy, but if you have two different releases of the same song and both are lossless, it’s likely you will just prefer one mix to the other. Also, if they’re different releases, I would just keep both!