Unrealistic Flac compression

[Punkishlyevil]

Someone in the TSP/Zwan hub seeded a show today. They ripped it from a CD to a wav file and compressed it to level 8 flacs. The flac bitrates are ranging from high 200s to high 300s. This seems way to low of a bitrate for a flac. This seems more like an mp3 bitrate. When I mentioned this to him he reripped a track and flaced it and it did the same thing. He seeded a different show also today and did the same thing, but when he flaced it it did normal 600-900 kb/s bitrates. So does anyone have any clue why these bitrates are so low? Do you want frequency analysis pictures from eac/analfreq?

[U2Lynne]

Well, the pictures would certainly help to tell the story, so I would grab a 1.5 to 2 second picture from the middle of a track (I think that is what Five usually asks for).

[Punkishlyevil]

What kind of picture? A spectral analysis or a frequency analysis? EAC or analfreq or Cool Edit Pro 2.0?

[U2Lynne]

I believe analfreq is the tool most are using these days. And we like to see both a spectral analysis and a frequency analysis.

[RainDawg]

That is quite low, but no need to assume mp3. If the source material is a mono signal, bitrates this low can indeed happen with FLAC. In fact, if you take audio and go FLAC > MP3 > FLAC, the chances are that the second file will have almost identical bitrate as the first one....compressing to lossy formats and then back don't change the compression much.

I'd still like to see a spectral anlysis and frequency sweep plot, but I'm going to venture a guess that it's mono lossless rather than mp3...

[Five]

this is easy to solve. make md5 sums for the original WAV files, then decompress the FLACs you made in another folder and check if the decompressed WAVs (from your FLACs) are identical or not.

[Punkishlyevil]

Frequency/spectral pictures.

[Punkishlyevil]

I'm not really worried if its mp3, because mp3s wouldn't make a flac compress so much. The person who ripped the CD and I were both just very confused by why it is so compressed. The mono explanation would make sense though.

[feralicious]

Originally Posted by Punkishlyevil

Frequency/spectral pictures.

Also, I would do the spectral analysis in CoolEdit as we discovered in another thread here that EAC SAs aren't very reliable.

Mods: maybe there should be a sticky about that? I don't think that problem is well known.

[Five]

Originally Posted by feralicious

Also, I would do the spectral analysis in CoolEdit as we discovered in another thread here that EAC SAs aren't very reliable.

Mods: maybe there should be a sticky about that? I don't think that problem is well known.

CEP/Audition is the best for sure... EAC has proven not very reliable. We need a freeware solution for people, too I'm thinking up a solution for this.

Originally Posted by Punkishlyevil

I'm not really worried if its mp3, because mp3s wouldn't make a flac compress so much. The person who ripped the CD and I were both just very confused by why it is so compressed. The mono explanation would make sense though.

It looks like an mp3 source to me based on the spectral view, although i don't think that's the cause of the small torrent size.

[feralicious]

Yeah and that Anal Freq pic doesn't look too good.

[Punkishlyevil]

Originally Posted by feralicious

Yeah and that Anal Freq pic doesn't look too good.

Yeah when I saw the AnalFreq I was a bit worried.

[Punkishlyevil]

Cool Edit.

[NINJA]

Originally Posted by Punkishlyevil

Cool Edit.

looks pretty normal for a 60's or early 70's audience recording


can also indicate noise reduction was used