Is it possible that purchased songs are marked as fake?

[Fake No Funk]

Quite frequently users ask me things like:
"Is it possible that songs purchased on b**tp*rt or b*ndc*mp etc. are marked as fake while warez downloaded FLACs are marked as legit"

The quick answer is: Yes

The longer answer: It depends....

An illegal downloaded flac can of course be a 100% high quality rip when encoded with proper settings ;) just because it is illegal does not necessarily mean it is low quality...

About the mentioned platforms:
I've seen songs of very questionable quality from those platforms (even *m*z*n or *t*n*s)

However, as I write on the homepage, it is technically not possible to get the 100% accurate bitrate from the pure audiostream.

For instancen, if you use a sine-wave-generaor and record a single pure 5kHz sound and rip it with the highest possible quality ever, the spectum will look lousy and the app will mark it as "fake". This might also happen if you record MIDI signals that don't have overtones reaching the higher frequencies - the sound will be 100% digital and high quality, but the spectrum will not visualize this because the high frequencies are missing.

"Fakin' The Funk?" is a frequency-spectrum analyzer. That means: It tries to detect fake files by checking the frequency spectrum.

That's quite a hard job, especially when it gets to high quality files above 192 kHz (keep in mind that most people cannot hear a difference between 192, 256 or 320 kbps files!) The differences in the frequency spectrum between 256 and 320 kbps are very small; depending on the used encoder maybe even not visual.

That's the reason why I recommend to consider the results of my app as a kind of preselection; it's always worth to check the findings with your own eyes - or even better - ears :-)