"Fake" lossless file from artist's store? Options

[pinoniceusagi]

Hi. I bought an ALAC-encoded album from an artists' official homepage a few days back. The file size was a bit smaller than I expected (and the "bitrate" displayed in foobar lower than 90% of my own lossless rips).

So, I checked the filed with this application called Audiochecker 2.0.

It reports the rip as being MP3s that have been transcoded into lossless format. I tried the same application on a lot of my own lossless rips, and it reports my own rips as "true" lossless rips.

Is there a way to confirm whether the album I bought really is a lossy to lossless transcode or not? I do not own the original CD, so I can't compare that way.

[EagleScout1998]

This might not be an exact science, but you could burn the files onto CD as audio (not data), and then have Tau Analyzer scan the tracks on the CD. It should be able to tell you whether the source files were lossless (CDA) or lossy (MPEG). Although, it looks like your Audiochecker program does the same thing.