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Resolved Question

how to find out if .cda was made from wav or mp3

Jan 13, 2012 7:34AM PST

Is there a way to find out if an audio cd (.cda) was made from wav or mp3 files? I thought maybe I could check the file size of the audio cd compared to another audio cd that I know was made from wav (so if the size is way less it was probably mp3; if it's about the same size it was probably wav), but I can't figure out how to do this. CDA discs are confusing to me. Can anyone direct me on how I might be able to check the size of the files on them?

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sonofkurl has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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Try this
Jan 14, 2012 12:06AM PST
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awesome, except...
Jan 14, 2012 7:04AM PST

This is exactly what I need. The only problem is I tried it out and I don't understand the results. Have you used this program before? If so, could you tell me what this means?-- Under the 'status' column for each track it only went to 99% then moved on to the next track. This happened for all the tracks. It also showed hundreds of errors for each track in the 'error' column. For 'CD conclusion', under the 'status' column it said UNKN. Also the 'Spectrum' and 'Frequency' tabs were unclickable, and the 'CD info' tab was blank. I ran it a second time with the same results. (Note the CD is burned but it works fine in any player or computer.) I tried looking online for help or examples, but couldn't find much. I saw one snapshot of someone's results that showed each track having a 'CDDA' or 'UNKN' or 'MPEG' under the 'status' column instead of 99%. The writer said CDDA and UNKN mean the track is good quality, and MPEG means it's low quality. Any ideas what my results meant?

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Your cdr has to many errors to read correctly.
Jan 14, 2012 8:29AM PST
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Maybe you could burn another cd and test.
Jan 14, 2012 8:45AM PST

I don't think you ripping it back to your computer as lossless will fool the analyzer. If that disk of yours came from mp3, lossless encoding won't add what mp3 encoding took away.

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I did the test, didn't fool anything.
Jan 14, 2012 9:15AM PST
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You telling us that from flac...
Jan 15, 2012 3:53PM PST

is also mpeg? Gave any test on .wav to cdda?

I find this kind of interesting so I did a little test of my own and here's my result:

mp4 to cdda, 16 songs: first 3 are mpeg and the rest are cdda.

.wav to cdda, 16 songs: first 1 is mpeg and the rest are cdda. (so 2 did changed)

As far listening test goes, mpeg or cdda, it sounded the same to me.

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resolved, thanks!
Jan 15, 2012 4:57PM PST

Ah yes, thanks for the feedback and examples. You were right, it was basically inconclusive because of all the errors. But it turned out it wasn't a problem with the CD, it was my cheap external CD drive. I tried a different CD drive and it worked. Turned out the CD was originally made from mp3s as I expected. =T Oh well. I made use of that program for a bunch of other CDs as well. Thanks for this great new tool!