Mp3 or Not???

[ffooky]

Originally Posted by Five

Here's SA using Audacity, zoomed in and fulltrack. I can't tell anything from these shots.

Audacity's SA isn't great but it ain't that bad...you've only got the x axis (or is it the y?) going up to 7kHz :-)

[ffooky]

I'm not 100% sure this is MPEG, though it's clearly not the recording in its untouched state...what's the source given ?

[Five]

It was this:
Blind Melon - Good Foot Workshop Demos

it looks like this Hendrix mp3-sourced show that came up a couple months ago. I think it's high bitrate VBR mp3 but that's just my best guess... whatever it is it is not tradeable. I got this thinking it might be another source but it is just a bad copy of the one I already have.

they banned it

I woke up and adjusted the scale of Audtion's SA and now it works really well! thanks. Here's the new shots:

[ffooky]

Righto. If I had to give a verdict I'd say crapola noise reduction but that's as bad as MPEG IMO anyway.

BTW, for cutting on sector boundaries with Audacity:

[Five]

Originally Posted by ffooky

Righto. If I had to give a verdict I'd say crapola noise reduction but that's as bad as MPEG IMO anyway.

I have never seen any nr plug that creates those square shapes at the top of the spectrum. Bad nr can sometimes resemble the straight cutoff of CBR but the lego city stairstep look in these shots has to be lossy. It looks almost like MD compression (altho I don't think that's it either). Maybe AAC? It looks a little like this, too:

[Five]

Originally Posted by ffooky

BTW, for cutting on sector boundaries with Audacity:

THANKS VERY MUCH!!

I've saved this to my audacity folder so I don't lose it.

Okay, so you set selection format to cdda sectors as in your screenshot, then what? Is there a way to set cue stops on the sector boundaries and split a show into however many tracks or is it only possible to split by selecting in this mode, cutting then pasting into a new window and saving each individual track?

[ffooky]

Originally Posted by Five

I have never seen any nr plug that creates those square shapes at the top of the spectrum. Bad nr can sometimes resemble the straight cutoff of CBR but the lego city stairstep look in these shots has to be lossy. It looks almost like MD compression (altho I don't think that's it either). Maybe AAC? It looks a little like this, too:

There's definitely something rotten going on but it's the stair step pattern of the high end roll off on the Analfreq (the name killed my kids BTW) and Audacity FAs that intrigues me. I've seen this phenomenon on several shows that *claim* to be from silvers (a recent Hendrix boot on Usenet comes to mind) and I have never been able to replicate it with any of the lossy encoders at my disposal. My experience of AAC is that you tend to get a typically steep and almost complete drop at the top end of the spectral analysis, around 16kHz and then a little island of frequencies after that, whose range and depth is determined by the bitrate at which the AAC was encoded.

[ffooky]

Originally Posted by Five

THANKS VERY MUCH!!

I've saved this to my audacity folder so I don't lose it.

Okay, so you set selection format to cdda sectors as in your screenshot, then what? Is there a way to set cue stops on the sector boundaries and split a show into however many tracks or is it only possible to split by selecting in this mode, cutting then pasting into a new window and saving each individual track?

There may very well be a more elegant method but I park my cursor at an XX+0000 position, one track at a time and go Edit->Select...->Start to Cursor and then File->Export Selection as WAV, Delete and on to the next one. If the last track has any digital silence then I usually cut that at a boundary and discard the last few null samples or alternatively put the cursor at the very end, select Generate->Silence and then just trim that off at the first available boundary.

[RainDawg]

Hey...I saw that ffooky .

You forget that as soon as you post, it sends out the message via email to anyone subscribed to the thread. Deleting it doesn't help .

[Five]

Originally Posted by ffooky

There's definitely something rotten going on but it's the stair step pattern of the high end roll off on the Analfreq (the name killed my kids BTW) and Audacity FAs that intrigues me. I've seen this phenomenon on several shows that *claim* to be from silvers (a recent Hendrix boot on Usenet comes to mind) and I have never been able to replicate it with any of the lossy encoders at my disposal. My experience of AAC is that you tend to get a typically steep and almost complete drop at the top end of the spectral analysis, around 16kHz and then a little island of frequencies after that, whose range and depth is determined by the bitrate at which the AAC was encoded.

well it's really the SA that's most alarming. lossy encoding is the only thing that causes the zoomed SA to look like it's built from squares. Just because it's from Silvers doesn't mean it's lossless... there was a Metallica '86 show on EZT directly from silvers which was mp3-sourced a while back.

and thanks for the Audacity tips. it would be cool if they would add cue stops which could be on the boundaries or not and a splitting function someday.

[ffooky]

I've just come back in to the room and my 11 year old is claiming he just sent some smilies but he looks as guilty as hell. If whatever he did was worse than that please can you PM me the details.

[Five]

no sweat it really was just smilies

[ffooky]

Originally Posted by Five

no sweat it really was just smilies

OK then. He says he's sorry and so am I.

On a happier note, I've just had a fiddle with Audacity...First go Edit->Move Cursor...->to Track Start and hit Project->Add Label At Selection. Then select yer boundary points one by one adding a label for each one. Once you've got labels added for them all go to File->Export Multiple... Choose your export format and location, select "Split files based on:Labels", probably safest to name by numbering consecutively and hit Export

Yeah, dirty silvers are certainly out there. Can you post some examples of known noise reduction treated files, the more amateurishly applied the better.

[Five]

thanks so much for this tip ffooky I will be trying this out soon!

[Five]

Originally Posted by ffooky

Yeah, dirty silvers are certainly out there. Can you post some examples of known noise reduction treated files, the more amateurishly applied the better.

...and I'll see what I can do about this as well.