I can't find my Creedence CDs and I seem to have deleted the MP3s I ripped of them (probably because they were -r3mix and I had been planning on re-ripping them for a long time). So I'm whining about losing a bunch of CDs last time I moved and my brother-in-law says he has the Creedence CDs and I can borrow them then he gives me some CDRs. I pop them in to rip with EAC and one gets picked up by CDDB just fine but the other one doesn't -- it has 3 extra weird tracks at the end.

I'm trying to figure out if these are actual direct copies of the real CDs (or of the WAVs with extra tracks on the end), or if some guy burned these from MP3s. They sound OK when I turn them up -- the cymbals sound tinny but not wooshy. I know the original CDs were never perfect sounding.

So I've got the WAV files ripped, and I'm trying to figure out if they were ever compressed. Is there a simple way to do this besides just listening to them? The fact that one of the CDs was recognized on CDDB doesn't mean much, does it? Doesn't CDDB just look at the track times?

yeah, in EAC, open up the wav editor, if it had the blockyness to it, its probably decoded mp3

go to tools / process wav, then spec view in display

check out some known decoded mp3 to wav so you can see what i am talking about

i know there have been a few other threads around here about this too

Ehm, no, you are far better off with something like this:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=27648

WOW. That program is GREAT!

Just kidding. It's horrible. It looks promising enough that it manages to waste your time until you finally figure out it's not much help.

Pardon me, but WTF are you talking about?

It's by far your best bet. I use auCDtect a lot (calling it from Mr QuestionMan) and it's pretty accurate.

He is talking about GUI program called 'tau analyzer' which includes auCDtect functionality.

So, for his information, there is a small command line program 'auCDtect' that analyses .wav files if they were decoded from mp3 or other lossy format.

Yeah I know.
What I'm saying is that the program isn't "horrible".

Yeah, I suppose I just had bad lucky with it. I was annoyed that it kept completely freezing my machine, has no option to analyze a WAV without re-burning it to an audio CD and is somewhat lacking in documentation.

auCDtect is all you need. It can analyze wav files and is simple to use.

Surprised no one mentioned Foobar's quick and dirty simple spectrum. If you've got a copy of Foobar on your machine, Dimension, play the .wav files and see if you've got a solid spectrum or two channels with some black at the top. A good amount of black space is perhaps the easiest way to diagnose mp3 sourced CDs.

Just do as Gambit says and use auCDtect from command line. It's the best & easiest solution. What's all this fuzz 'bout stupid GUI's anyways.....

http://www.true-audio.com/site.download

So, Gambit I was looking for your Mr QuestionMan and having trouble finding it. Are you still developing it? And where is the latest release?
Thanx

Sorry,
Found Mr Questionman, cool!!