It seems the fakers are at it again, re-coding MP3's of popular artists, latest discovered is the Norah Jones "Come away with Me"
album, a whole bundle of 320k files, some good some bad, some just plain aweful.
You might be better off going for 256k copies of these files, they seem mostly genuine, out of 7 users with 320k copies, there were three different file size groups, so any attempt at multi-sourcing (WinMx) was useless, two of these three groups, have files so obviously re-coded from 128k or 160k, as to be easily detected by ear, the third was so heavily normalised as to make it unlistenable except perhaps in the subway at the morning rush hour.
As mentioned in a much earlier post the ENCSPOT utility will point out the subtle details of your MP3 files, show up original rips, and report on the overall quality, compression, bit-rate, use of joint Stereo etc.
If the link is still valid it was
www.guerillasoft.com/encspot
Give it a try, you may be disgusted at your collection, there is some real rubbish out there, old Xing and Blade encoded stuff, and a host of other less than state of the art, codings.
For a real good job... Lame 3.92 and RazorLame seem the best
quality utilities around today..
www.dors.de/razorlame and
www.mp3dev.org
Snark...