I'm brand new to this and I'm just trying to get the basic audio toolkit.

I'm looking for some program that show me graphically (or descriptive text works too) how close to CD quality a certain file is. I've seen the graphs that they produce on these forums, but I don't know what program to download. The purpose is to be sure that whatever I just converted in FB is really loseless, sort of like a double check. Not to mention I would want it so that I could analyze the mp3's already in my library.

Anyway, what program do you use for spectrum analysis?

Actually, now that I think about it, if there are any other really good programs in your audio toolkit that I most likely don't know about, lemme know.

Spectrum analysis should not be used to judge the quality of an encoding.

what should be used then? What do you use to make sure that what you've converted really did come out loseless, that you didn't mess up somewhere? Like I said, I'm brand new at this, I'm sure I'm gonna mess up.

Doesn't spectrum analysis tell you if all frequency's of the audio spectrum are at 100%? Wouldn't that help?

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....265&#entry77265

For lossless, you should just compare original wav hash to decoded lossless hash.

lossless is lossless as the name says.
you could use checksums to make sure that it's indeed lossless (MD5 etc etc)

edit: dreamliner77 was faster

It can be helpful because if you see that all frequencies up to 22 khz are present, it is probably lossless, but it could also be Blade MP3 at 320k
For a start, you can try with the EAC spectrum analyzer. If you want a program that analyzes wav files and tries to guess if they are CD or MP3 sourced, take a look at aucdtect.

>>Doesn't spectrum analysis tell you if all frequency's of the audio spectrum are at 100%? Wouldn't that help?
It woudn't.
What will be better - stream downsampled to 8KHz or complete crap but with 16KHz maximum freq. present ?
The best measurement of sound that human can hear is human ear.
Read FAQ and search this site for ABX test principles...
EDIT:
Oh ? Or I misunderstood the original post ?
What encoding did you mean - loseless or lossy ?
If you mean loseless encoding - simply compare the decoded result bit-to-bit with Norton Commander for example.

Or use foobar's bit-compare tracks option to compare against the uncompressed files if you keep them (just to check)

Use the bitcompare feature in foobar. It will tell you if a file is bit for bit identical.

You can't use a spectrum analysis to do that since it will only show you what the frequency content of the signal is, which is of little relevence. You need something that can actually compare individual samples and check that they're the same.