"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.

[krafty]

To the original poster, I need to say that I had a similar experience with the company that is in charge of supplying the digital downloads for Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds official store, called Topspin. I bought 2 singles in FLAC format and found out that 3 out of 4 tracks were possibly MP3 encodes that were converted to FLAC. I did comparisons with ripped CDs on the net and the evidence was quite clear to me that some of the digital downloads tracks were sourced from lossy. Since then I stopped buying FLAC from artists store.

Luckly, they refunded me after they've seen the comparisons between spectrograms. But they had insisted even after redunding me, that the sources were lossless.
I believe the people behind those comments are not audio literate, and the people who are working on producing the files are a bunch of amateurs who use a script to mass convert from sources they don't even know what it is.

Until we have a proper MD5/SHA control of files plus full HD PDF booklets, I will pass.

This post has been edited by krafty: Sep 16 2012, 18:44