Changes

and the answer is... no, sorry folks
:i was wondering if The Fragile was HDCD. weird how only two tracks are, though, as you said. i've been reading up on HDCD over at Hydrogenaudio and it's definite that HDCD encoding doesn't happen by accident. as well, it is possible that it would only light up (on WMP, i assume you mean) at a certain point in the track, because HDCD information doesn't necessarily have to start at the very beginning of the track. for instance, with the peak extending function, that only engages at the top of the peaks of the waveform where they reach the top of the brickwall, and therefore would only light up the HDCD icon in WMP once the song reached the first of those points (if it didn't use other HDCD information, like noise filtering, from the start). anyway, here [http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t30999-0.html] is a three-page topic on various attempts to rip HDCD a couple of years ago. the third page has a step-by-step method to do it using EAC and hdcd.exe (link available in the topic itself), but you can also get dBpowerAMP to do it automatically. however, i'd only consider an NIN HDCD rip worthwhile if it actually reduced the dynamic compression (i.e. the peaks don't hit the brick wall), so if you were to use one of these methods on TDTWWA or the two songs from The Fragile, the most accurate way to see if the HDCD ripping has an effect is if peaks are restored on the HDCD rip compared to the regular 16bit rip. - [[User:Seasonsinthesky|Seasonsinthesky]] 08:40, 9 January 2010 (PST)
 
Tested both halos 13 and 14r (used hdcd.exe v0.2) - it does say "HDCD detected" but min/max gain values stay at 0.0 dB and Peak Extend Never Enabled. There's that predictable -6 dB volume drop in 24-bit file (exactly like people wrote on those forums), and the waveforms visually matched 100% when i doubled the vertical zoom of 2nd window of Nero Wave Editor (which i loaded test files into). Conclusion: false alarm, no need to check other halos. Another reason to say so: if it was real, it would have been discovered/discussed/documented/etc... much earlier. [[User:BenAkenobi|BenAkenobi]] 02:57, 10 January 2010 (PST)
181

edits