Great program to help detect the true quality of your music files

[Will]

I found this amazing program called "Fakin’ The Funk" that I use alongside MusicBee to keep my library in check. You might think your library is all at 320 bitrate but it's probably not.

About half of all MP3s in the wild are fake or upscaled by people who have no clue how lossy file compression works.

I've even had MP3s I bought from the top companies that were not the bitrate they were supposed to be. It's rare but it happens.

Fakin’ The Funk will allow you to import your entire loss and lossless audio collection (supported audio formats at this time are MP3, MP4/M4A, OGG, OPUS, FLAC, WMA, AAC, ALAC, MPC, SPX, SFX, TTA and WAV) and batch scan them to calculate and display bitrate and frequency. If the scan finds a wrong bitrate or lower peak-frequency, Fakin’ The Funk will show you the audio files actual bitrate.

Another nice feature is that Fakin’ The Funk can also detect upscaled files. So if an MP3 has been upscaled from say 128kbps to 320kbps, it will tell you that after you batch analyze.

After all your audio files have been analyzed you have the opportunity to then rename the lower-quality files, copy, move or send them to the recycle bin.

It also has a very nice spectrum analyzer and you can save them as images.

You can find it here and it's $20 or €15.99:
https://fakinthefunk.net/en/

DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated in any way with the program or it's authors, and I'm not being paid (I wish) for this post.

If you want something not quite as automated but free and cross-platform, check out Spek:
http://spek.cc/

(P.S. This would be a super cool feature for MusicBee)

[psychoadept]

I've been using Spek for a long time, but this looks like it would make the process a lot easier.  I'll check it out!

[urfausto]

i use this too and first time i bought a software. it's the best one on the market.

[theta_wave]

I found this amazing program called "Fakin’ The Funk" that I use alongside MusicBee to keep my library in check. You might think your library is all at 320 bitrate but it's probably not.

Umm, does it distinguish between variable bitrate encoding and constant bitrate encoding?  I mean, open up spek to see whether the highlighted file has a 16kHz shelf, a telltale sign that it is indeed encoded from a 128kbps source (lossy to lossy transcode), a big no-no.  Or how about the 19.7kHz V0 shelf versus a 20.5kHz 320kbps shelf as dictated by LAME (probably the most widespread encoder)?  Then again, some soft solo piano tracks never feature tones that are >16kHz.  So, it is dependent on what kind music is contained in the track to be analyzed.  Like somebody else earlier stated, it is easy to use spek or audacity (and link them as external tools in Musicbee) to check quickly whether a lossy encoded track truly came from a lossless source.  I'm afraid that there could be too many false positives from that program you linked.

[psychoadept]

Does anyone have an installer for Fakin' the Funk from version 1.5.0.105 to 2.1.0.131? Internet Archive had the 2.2.0.133 version, which has the same bug as the current version. I'm hoping an earlier one will be pre-bug. (The bug prevents files from being sent by command line when the program is closed.)

[hiccup]

https://www.heise.de/download/product/fakin_thefunk_/download

[psychoadept]

Thanks! So far I'm getting an error when trying to run it, which may have to do with having a newer version previously installed (even though I did unintall it). Still troubleshooting to see if I can resolve it.

Update: Got it running after uninstalling with Geek Uninstaller. Appears to be working as expected, yay!

[hiccup]

Just curious:
Have you found this tool to be actually useful?
I recall testing it a long time ago, and I remember it failed miserably with some test files I ran through it.
False positives, failing to recognise tracks that I had actually re-encoded, etc.
Could you describe where or when it is useful and completely reliable?

(or maybe the tool has improved a lot over the last couple of years?)

[Messiaen]

Have you found this tool to be actually useful?

I like how you qualify that with "actually"...  

As that is exactly the point - wherever you encounter something which throws numerous and verifiable false-positives, one kind of loses faith in the product as a whole.  Personally, I consider it wholly unreliable for MP3's - as I retained the original FLAC's used to generate them (using MB's latest lame aiming for 320 CBR), FTF would quite happily accept/verify the FLAC's as fine, but the MP3's were (according to FTF) sometimes wildly divergent.  I could accept the odd misinterpreted 256 rate here and there, but it rather laughably decided that almost an entire collection of Erik Satie music was magically only 64 bits.  Admittedly, Satie is quiet solo-piano, so the spectrum may not challenge some fancy Pink Floyd remaster (or whatever), but if the FLAC was fine two minutes ago, how did the spectrum shelf drop so precipitously?  Obviously, it didn't, so false-positive.  Just one example.

Out of an entire collection of around 30,000 tracks it rejected just under 2,000 of them (some legitimately, as I knew they never had reliable sources to begin with, and had been mistakenly upscaled), but after verifying the sources of the rest (and re-ripping, just in case I was at fault originally), I concluded that only around 100 were legitimately dodgy.

So... "actually useful"?  Hard to say... it spurned me to spend an afternoon re-confirming my collection, but that's about it - I keep it installed just to see what it thinks of any new downloads I get, but "grain of salt" comes to mind.  That being said, as popular sites like Bandcamp don't actually claim any responsibility for the originating quality of their downloads (the artists themselves hold that obligation with the sources they provide), that grain of salt begins to transcend the quaintness of being a mere pithy-saying to becoming a proper phrase-to-live-by.

If nothing else, Fakin' the Funk is a really good tool to needlessly scare the bejesus out of unsuspecting beginners who put too much faith in superficial numbers... and automation.

Just my opinion, anyway, for what it may be worth.