Hi all,

I need your help in collecting audio tracks to test hardware player quality and capabilities.

While sound quality is the main issue, other considerations [may not be realistic right now] may include checks for ID3V1/ID3V2/lyrics3/APE tag support, gapless playback...

Decoder quality-related tracks should easily reveal flaws to the ear without the need for sophisticated testing equipment. If it does, please specify so.

Please convert WAV test files to FLAC to save time and space [but do not transcode from MP3! .]

A starting point would be the infamous 8191/8206 bug - I was bitten by it when I bought a "bargain" MP3 CD player [Sansui CD-W212] and many of my LAME and FhG MP3s had blips at random spots. Then I played sweep.mp3 on it and the decoder totally borked. Not much of a bargain, after all

I have attached one test track, sweep.flac to this post. It's a sine wave sweep from 20 to 20000 Hz and can reveal decoder shortcomings related to the 8191/8206 ISO specification bug. LAME uses values higher than 8191 to encode MP3s, so if the decoder cannot handle this, your LAME MP3s may have glitches/other artifacts.

Decompress the FLAC file, encode with LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard and play back. Listen for any blips or glitches in the smooth sweep from 20 to 20000 Hz.

100only.flac is the next part of the 8191/8206 bug and consists of a pure 100Hz sine wave. Artifacts may not be easily noticeable to the ear, so you may need to plug it into a signal analysis machine [such as your laptop ]

Encode the track with LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard, and watch out for periodic dropouts as described at the 8191/8206 bug page.