Lossless Audio Checker: A Software for the Detection of Upscaling, Upsampling, and Transcoding in Lossless Musical Tracks
Julien Lacroix, Yann Prime, Alexandre Remy, Olivier Derrien · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2015
Internet music dealers currently sell “CD-Quality” tracks, or even better (“Studio-Master”), thanks to lossless audio coding formats (FLAC, ALAC). However, a lossless format does not guarantee that the audio content is what it seems to be. The audio signal may have been upscaled (increasing the resolution), upsampled (increasing the sampling rate) or even transcoded from a lossy to a lossless format. In this paper, we describe a new software that analyzes lossless audio tracks and detects upsampling, upscaling and transcoding (only for AAC in this early version). Validation tests over a large music database (with groundtruth available) show that this method is fast and accurate: 100% of success for upscaling and transcoding, 91.3% for upsampling.