Anyone think of a good way for me to search for bad quality mp3s?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Anyone think of a good way for me to search for bad quality mp3s?

Here’s the deal; I’ve got a large collection of mp3s that I’ve been downloading, buying and ripping since around 2000. What I’d like to do is be able to run a program/script on my music folder and for it to weed out all the mp3s that aren’t 320k, flac or wav so that I can re-purchase or re-rip them.

Any ideas how I can do this? I tried searching for files above a certain size but it’s not a very elegant solution…

2

Windows and Mac allow the bitrate field to be displayed in a file browser. That column can be sorted, and you can manually select those you wish to move.

Also, most music managers can also display and sort based on bitrate. Media Monkey can search files based on bitrate, iTunes also offers this (and can build smart playlists based on bitrate).

3

But how does this stop music thats been re-encoded from 192 to 320 just so people will DL it

4

This, traktor too.

There was actually a program I used on PC just for this purpose that went through your music files and highlighted stuff green if it was good, then yellow and bad based on lower quality. Forget the name.

5

I could have sworn there was a program that would go through the properties/meta data of mp3’s and let you know of modifications made to the original file, but I can’t remember what it was.

I guess if you bought mp3s from a trusted source, you shouldn’t have this problem.

And if you’re downloading from a non trusted source (shame!) then try to grab a scene release or only steal from a trusted site.

6

It doesn’t.
And it can’t.

There is some spectral analysis that can be done to find songs that have ever been compressed below 128kbps (LAME in particular leaves some pretty obvious fingerprints below 128kbps)…but even that is more art than science…and it is a TOTALLY manual process. If a track is currently reporting 320, but was re-encoded from 224…that would be REALLY hard to spot…especially if you don’t have an uncompressed original for a side-by-side comparison of the spectral analysis (or FFT).

7

For Spectrum Analysis, a useful tool you can use (free and cross platform - linux too!) is Spek.

I’m sure it’s been mentioned around here somewhere, but that will let you choose a file / drag a song onto it and it will chuck out the spectrogram for you to verify the quality.

In general, any mp3’s that are majorly lopped off anywhere below the 20k(ish) mark, which is the maximum the majority of peoples listening range can hear, would not be considered a true 320kbps file. Also remember that portions of the track may intentionality be cut off at a specified freq. by the producer too.

8

dude i once joined a legit record pool and they had re-encoded all there 2008 and beyond files to 320. Once Traktor analyzed them they popped up as 192. I know this doesn’t help — but sometimes even buying your music results in poor quality tracks.

9

AudioChecker (attached)

It helped me find many a FLAC that was actually a re-encoded mp3. It can take quite a while though - at first I even thought the program was hanging on me. The attachment is a .rar inside a .zip, sorry if that’s a bit weird, but I couldn’t compress it small enough in zip format to match the allowable upload file size, managed it with rar but that wasn’t recognized as a valid file type, so I had to ‘sneak’ it in.

10

Anyone think of a good way for me to search for bad quality mp3s?

If its a zip within a rar (or vice versa) and you’re using winrar to extract…I think you can just right click, extract here and it’ll do everything at once.

(I think)

11

In most cases you can tell the difference between a 192 and 320. i hope you can tell if it’s flac or not…
Wish a program existed for mac. would be a huge help.