BitPerfect: PCM Bit-Perfect Tester

[Yarp]

I was kinda surprised just how close even the imperfect analog sources ended up scoring. The thing that I didn't really expect though is why stereo stuff scored so high in the 65-70% range. It seemed awful high to me to say that the channels are 70% the same on average. But, after giving it some more thought, and seeing the result of the Fake Stereo tests it does make some sense.

If a 100% score is channels being exactly the same, then 0% would be the channels completely opposite, ie. one super loud and one super quiet. The Fake stereo stuff is processed so heavily with voices completely in one channel, that ends up happening and they scored low around 30-40% the same. But then it occurred to me that when you mix for stereo, the actors are usually directly in front of the camera so the separation level is small anyway. So our scale is roughly:

I think mono analog sources scoring close to 1 makes sense since it's mainly just differences in noise. They should be 95%+ the same and shouldn't change the soundstage if at all.

Joint Stereo mp3s can save you a lot of space (vs true stereo) since both channels share a lot of info so I'd assume that is what is happening here too with the 65-70% range for stereo mixes. Not just actors voices, but music, even in stereo is still a lot of the same data in both channels.

[bronan]

Added a link to the top post for BP 2.1. It's Windows only for now, but I will do OS X and Linux builds soon. Just a heads up, "File Info" is now called Snapshots, and you'll want to check the "Stats only" box or it will run some more tests and generate a data file. I will leave it to the more industrious among you to figure out what that will be for

[bronan]

BitPerfect 2.2 beta is available now on the top post. This release includes a new Snapshot Inspector to see inside the generated .snap files. So what are they for? They power a new website I've been working on - https://audiocompare.cc - where you can easily compare audio tracks between 2 releases ala capsaholic. It's still a work in progress, but just about usable now.

[bronan]

2.3 is now up. Fixed a couple bugs I found opening various audio tracks. In one case, it wasn't reading Mono files with the stream flagged as Center instead of Left, and the other was with RF64 files and using the wrong datachunk size to advance the header reader.

[BusterD]

Seems to be currently down for me (and "It's not just you!" on downforeveryoneorjustme.com as well), but great that it's come this far!

[bronan]

Sorry about that, looks like the IP address changed and the record wasn't updated. Should work shortly, let me know if you still have issues.

[BusterD]

Yep, looks good on this end, thanks!

[bronan]

Version 2.4 is now available on the top post. This release is mostly just graphing tweaks for the Snapshot Inspector, but the spectrograms should closely match Spek now.

[bronan]

A new beta download (2.5) is available for Windows on the first post. This is a pretty big update from .NET 5.0 to 8.0 frameworks, as well as the latest Avalonia UI which managed to break a lot of stuff coming out of its beta. Hopefully it's all working again, but I think message boxes may need some more attention.

[bronan]

Version 2.6 is now available for download for all platforms (Win/Mac/Linux) on the first post. Fixed the message box issues, cleaned up styling, made a bunch of small tweaks and tested functions on all platforms. The test CD is now available as a separate download as well.