14 DAY TRIAL // Information piracy and especially music piracy is one phenomenon widely known and well-spoken about for many years now and I guess there isn't anyone who hasn't heard of such a thing. Besides software piracy, music piracy is the world's largest such phenomenon and it ranges from the most ridiculous lawsuits (for downloading 2 Lassie episodes) up to immense industry branches which produce almost perfect copies of the original material and sell these huge amounts of CDs on the open market, sometimes even reaching large stores, with specialized departments.
Before thinking about the law enforcement or governmental institutions doing (or not) their jobs, you must know whether your new audio CD you have just bought is original or an almost perfect fake. And I am speaking about perfect fakes, because I assume all of you can easily make the difference between and original CD and a lousy-multiplied one... Well, at this point, you need a helping hand and this is exactly the point in developing software like Tau Analyzer.
The Looks
When I looked for the first time at the Tau Analyzer, I thought for myself that its appearance isn't too friendly but then, I realized that it really wasn't meant to be friendly, but functional. Being a program to be used rather seldom than an everyday software, I guess the Tau Analyzer can afford a less friendly look.
It has one main window, easily expandable to the fullscreen size of your monitor, having 7 tabs, each corresponding to either an internal feature or help and settings. No color-tweaking and no skins are available for this version of the Tau Analyzer and strictly in my opinion, I guess they aren't needed at all since it already looks very well. The active tabs have a square LED-type yellow light on, while those who are inactive or yet not accessible have it off; besides this availability indication for the features, the tabs and generally speaking, the whole software, has very visible text wherever needed.
Besides the tabs which show direct info about the tracks of a CD, the Tau Analyzer also sports a spectrum analyzer and a frequency one, thus allowing multiple views of the same numerical data, contributing more to the final result of the testing. Drive letter and operating speed are easy to choose by means on 2 dropdown menus, while generic commands for the Tau Analyzer have been placed in the left side and have large buttons with traditionally-accepted markings, for eject, go, stop and so on.
Overall, the GUI of the Tau Analyzer is pretty OK, with no futile elements and definitely task-oriented, while at the same time, remaining accessible even to individuals who haven't got any idea on sound analyzing.
The Works
Deep inside, the Tau Analyzer does one very simple thing: knowing that fake CDs are almost always replicated from (often) low-quality MP3 sources, it scans the tracks on the CD and looks for traces of MPEG encoding. In what sound is concerned, there are several tracks which the "investigator" must look for, such as special cut-offs and "gaps" in what certain frequencies are concerned.
These patterns being recognized, the user can form an idea of the origin of the disc he/she analyzed. The producers claim that the Tau Analyzer can detect even attempts made by the pirates to eliminate the traces of MPEG encoding; according to the statements on the official website attempts such as noise-shaping and dithering techniques are also spotted with Tau Analyzer therefore they say it is almost sure.
There also are the developers who state that out of 5683 discs analyzed, (dithered MP3, non-dithered MP3 and original discs), only few have been mistakenly diagnosed. Nevertheless, the producers of the software clearly say that under no circumstances should the results of the testing be taken as granted, especially when testing at high speeds.
And if it came to speed, I must add that the Tau Analyzer has 8 speeds, from 1 (the normal analysis speed) up to 8 times this default value. The Tracks tab displays info on start and ending time of the songs present on the disc, as well as their size in MB and the status the Tau Analyzer decided each track has: MPEG, CDDA and so on.
As a final remark, if after analyzing a CD and looking at either the resulting spectrum-display or Frequency response, you see a lot of irregularity and abnormally-decayed ends, then you must not be that sure you have an original CD anymore.
The Good
The best thing is that Tau Analyzer has proofs of its actions and results and thus, the moment these results will be sure enough, it can easily become the leading tool for non-original CDs.
The Bad
Nothing bad in the Tau Analyzer, except for the lack of a result-interpretation module, especially for the users who are neither into spectrum analyzers nor into frequency-works.
The Truth
Should the tests performed by the developers of Tau Analyzer and their results be even more consistent, I guess a new star would be born. Whatsoever, the Tau Analyzer is definitely one tool the professionals must at least test if not own.
Don't leave the page before inspecting the below snapshots:
