Verify your music collection with AudioTester
If you have a considerable large collection of music and audio files on your computer or a storage device, you may at times want to verify it to make sure it is free of any issues.
It is advisable to verify new music files before you add it to your collection.
Files may become corrupt for example during transfers to a new location or download from the Internet, or tags may have been set improperly, for instance after running an automatic tagging program on your whole collection or a subset of it.
AudioTester is a free portable program for Windows that verifies supported audio files that you drop on its interface. It supports folders as well so that you can drop the root folder of your music collection on it to have all audio files tested in one go.
The scan is reasonably fast thanks to the program's use of all cpu cores but may still take a while depending on how many files need to be tested by it.
AudioTester displays the status of the scan, the total number of files and the file that is currently being tested.
The list of results is displayed in the program interface after the verification. All audio files with errors are listed at the top with errors displayed after the file path and name. Note that all tested audio files are listed but all error-free files are listed at the bottom without error displayed next to them.
The main issue that you will encounter is that AudioTester does not offer any explanation of errors which means that you may not know how to fix them.
What does truncated or lost sync mean for instance and how would you fix those errors. The developer's website offers no help and the readme file supplied with the program neither.
Since AudioTester does not offer any tools to correct the errors found, it is necessary to use other tools, for instance MP3 Val or MP3 Diag for that.
Since both programs mentioned support analysis as well, the only reason to run AudioTester and not those program directly is if at least part of your music collection uses other audio formats.
AudioTester supports mp3 but also Ogg Vorbis, Flac and WavPack files. The program is Open Source and the source code is included in the download.
It is possible to run the program from the command line by adding a file or folder path as an argument, e.g. audiotester c:\mp3.
Ogg is still lossy
“what’s wron with mp3 files”
MP3 is a lossy format and as such it is an insult to music itself (like WMA, OGG, MPC. etc)
lel man. Digital audio is lossy by definition, what are your doing in our internetz?
ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_(signal_processing)
Few reasons:
because you’re limited to max of stereo 48khz/16bit, if you have any uncompressed audio file higher than that, then you have to convert/resample/etc to the proper format.
Any attempt to edit an mp3 file’s audio, and then resaving will result in worse quality of the audio versus working on a lossless format and then saving it as a mp3 file.
because saving that file as lossy format sucks for archivable purposes, because if (unlikely but still) mp3 went the way as vqf, then you have to hunt down the proper codecs or convert the format to a newer format, resulting in worse quality.
And finally, because not all audio is the same. While a majority (99%) of music will be perfect at 320kbps, there’s the few that have a noticeable difference, especially when you are listening to music through a top notch system. A lot of times when that happens I notice a very distinct glassy sound on some strings, or a lack of deep enough bass versus listening it to flac or CD.
As for ogg, I don’t use ogg, I really just use flac and mp3. But the benefit of ogg over mp3 definitely is the open source, and that it’s still being worked on, mp3 is pretty much done on improvement (mp3pro, mp3hd and mp3surround doesnt count)
also read this:
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-quality-degradation-in-mp3-audio-compared-to-original-CD
I’ve participated in that test too. And completely agree with the conclusion.
@Andrew okay, but since you agree to some losses, how do you choose which are acceptable?
For example, I participated in multiple double blind listening tests to acknowledge for myself that most of the time, I can’t distinct between properly encoded 256K MP3 and original audio-cd. And in some cases, I can’t even tell 128K from original.
And 320Kbps MP3s are undistinctible by 99.999% of testers. Heck, have you even tried ABX testing in foobar2000?
To the subject. This passage was telling that yes, there are losses, but their noticeability is in same range as CDA quantization noises. So you Don’t like mp3 not because how it sounds, but because of something entirely different.
So, tell us, what is it?
P.S. in that sense, ogg vorbis better than mpeg1 layerIII only because with some music genres it sounds more pleasantly on very low bitrates. And because it’s free. On high bitrates, you can’t tell between them.
yes digital audio is lossy to an minimal extent, but mp3 and other lossy formats remove audio and prevents it from being a bit-perfect conversion
About 80% of your readers likely aren’t going to have a reason to use this (and those that do are probably going to panic over nothing when they find all their Amazon/etc. downloads throwing up “LOST SYNC” errors).
Not to say it isn’t a useful program or anything, but immediately seeing cryptic/undocumented errors like that certainly shouldn’t be a sign to dump half your music library. Definitely a program to use if you know what the results are intended to point out.
I remember the old days when I had .mp3 files all around. Nowadays I only use .flac, .aac/m4a, .alac, ogg formats. MP3 was a very good idea 17 years ago. We gotta move on :D
what’s wron with mp3 files
Like your spelling; there’s something mi__ing in MP3 files
mp3 is a lossy format and limited to stereo 48khz/16bit and 320kbps, it’s outdated in comparison of new formats.