Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

[Mick_P]

Hello all

I've searched for an answer to this, but with no luck. Here's a scenario:

You're chatting to someone at work about The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers album. They say they have it and offer to do you a copy and, with wanton disregard for copyright infringement, you accept. Sometime later, you decide to rip this to FLAC using dBpoweramp. However, it turns out that this person never did have the original album, but merely a bunch of mp3s from which they created an audio CD for you.

So, I imagine that AccurateRip wouldn't recognise the tracks, but would dBpoweramp pass them as 'secure' rips? Or can it tell that what it's dealing with are substandard items?

Apologies if I'm asking very basic questions here. Thanks for reading.

[pjc2]

Re: Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

So, I imagine that AccurateRip wouldn't recognise the tracks,

AR will only verify audio that is identical to the original CD.

...would dBpoweramp pass them as 'secure' rips? Or can it tell that what it's dealing with are substandard items?

Secure has nothing to do with the quality of the audio on the disc. It simply means that it's confident that the bits on the disc have been accurately captured.

[Mick_P]

Re: Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

Secure has nothing to do with the quality of the audio on the disc. It simply means that it's confident that the bits on the disc have been accurately captured.

As I suspected. So basically, if AR doesn't recognise the rip, there's no guarantee that what you're ripping is of the same quality as the original disc. Is that right?

[Spoon]

Re: Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

Define an original disc...if someone burns mp3 to CD and then sells/gives that CD in large numbers - it is an unqiue disc and any ripping with that disc would give accuraterip results if submitted to ARs database.

[Mick_P]

Re: Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

Define an original disc...if someone burns mp3 to CD and then sells/gives that CD in large numbers - it is an unqiue disc and any ripping with that disc would give accuraterip results if submitted to ARs database.

Well, OK, what in this case I mean by an 'original disc' is either an official release or a faithful copy. Going back to my original post, my question is whether or not AR or dBpoweramp can tell that it's ripping tracks that although in WAV format from an audio CD have come from mp3 source and hence are of inferior quality to those released by the record label. Hope that's clear.

[Teknojnky]

Re: Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

accurate means that your rip is the same as x number of other users

secure means there were no un-recovered errors

neither means that the audio on the cd were never mp3 based

that said, your burned cd won't match the original cd if your burned cd was not burned with lossless files.

So, I imagine that AccurateRip wouldn't recognise the tracks

correct

but would dBpoweramp pass them as 'secure' rips?

if there were no errors detected during the reading of the cd-r, then it would be 'secure'.

Or can it tell that what it's dealing with are substandard items?

no, it can only compare your rip to someone elses (accurate) and ensure that what was on the cd-r was ripped without error (secure).

executive summary:
the audio of an mp3 burned cd-r will be different than the audio of a lossless copy, thus a burned mp3 cd-r will never match up the original cd (accurate), it can only match up to an exact copy of the burned mp3 cd (meaning someone else would have had to submit the exact mp3 cd-r that you have).

[eaglescout1998]

Re: Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

If I am correct, you are trying to figure out whether the CD-R was burned from a lossless source (ie. WAV or FLAC) or a lossy source (ie. MP3). There is a program called Tau Analyzer which may be able to help you.

Here's the link

http://true-audio.com/

[Mick_P]

Re: Spotting an audio CD made from mp3

Many thanks for the help and explanations, it's all very useful. And I'll take a look at the Tau Analyzer link.

This has all come about because I'm in the process of creating an archive of my CDs by ripping to FLAC. Over the years, like most people, I've ended up with quite a few CD copies that people have given me. However, I know that on at least a couple of occasions these audio CDs have been created from downloaded mp3s and I don't want to rip those to FLAC, thus polluting what ought to be an archive of only high-quality rips.

UPDATE: Tau Analyzer is perfect for my needs, many thanks. As you say, it can quickly tell me if the CD has been created from mp3s.