How to know which music file is better quality without listening to them?

[mindstormer]

Is there some kind of software that shows which music file is technically higher quality (higher bit rate, fro example)? I have 2 FLAC files of the same song and they are similar but not the exact size. I'm suspicious that perhaps one of the file was converted from a lower quality to FLAC for the sake of trying to provide lossless music.

Thanks.

[MindController]

media info

[poisondeathray]

Nope, you have to listen to it and/or examine waveforms

Flac can have different compression levels (0-8) and encoding settings, so the bitrate doesn't necessarily indicate much

And nothing will tell you what has been done to the audio before the flac stage (maybe some dithering noise applied, lossy encoding)

[johns0]

A poorly encoded music can be encoded to flac so media info will not help.

[jagabo]

One could be from a hissy, low bandwidth, mono VHS tape while the other is from a high quality CD. You couldn't necessarily tell the difference with MediaInfo.

[olyteddy]

A spectrogram display such as can be done in Audacity is a visual indicator of quality (or at least of frequency and dynamic range)

[johns0]

That still wont tell you if the sound is good since any type of crap in the wave length of low,medium and high bands can't be heard.

[budwzr]

I'm suspicious that perhaps one of the file was converted from a lower quality to FLAC for the sake of trying to provide lossless music.

Yeah, there's dirty skunks out there doing that. Especially DJ's with a lot of 128K Mp3's that won't hold up to amplification otherwise.

[Hoser Rob]

There are actually people who will convert mp3 or some other lossy codec to flac. That could definitely account for differences in file size. I can't see a good reason for anyone doing that but it happens. Frankly it sounds idiotic to me.

For the last decade major labels have been taking perfectly decent older recordings and remastering them by compressing the hell out of them and cranking up the highs mercilessly. I wouldn't touch any of them with a 10 foot pole. They're unlistenable to me. So I guess there's a lot of idiocy out there. Google "loudness wars".

Above all, though, as mentioned, mediainfo will say absolutely nothing about the sound quality. A crap recording will sound bad in 24/192 flac. And the better audio system you play it through the worse it'll sound.