I downloaded a file from Youtube that plays fine on my computer, sounds ok with computer buil-in speakers and with an ordinary headphone, but sounds distorted and lousy through my Bose system. OK I know this is bad recording, but some bizzare stuff with this file are as followes:
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This is an album with may songs all recorded in single track. So to separate the tracks when I run the Audacity’s silence finder looking for silence when db < -51 and minimum duration = 1 sec. it cannot find the silences where it should. Instead all found silences are near the very end of the last song of the album (and all labels are lumped together overlapping with each other. I tried undoing and re-running the silence finder many times and got the same strange result. Eventualy I ended up marking the silences manually and that worked fine; I was able to put each song in different tracks. But the question is why did the silence finder did not find the silences correctly? I know how to run this, and have done this many times for other sound files that worked perfectly - but not for this file.
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Now then when I run the Audacity’s spectrum analyzer (Analyze → Plot spectrum …) choosing random areas of the track I see “no data” ploted - just an empty graph whose vertical scale ranges from -90 dB to -80 dB. Then when I move the cursor over the same graph the data values shown in the boxes below the graph shows values like -114 dB or -120 dB or -192 dB, etc. that are obviously outside the normal range of the graph. Strange??? Now then when I select a range at the very end of the track (remember: that is at the very end of the last song) I see some spectrum plotted in the graph that are in normal graph area. Also as I described in #1 above this is the same area where the silence finder “thinks” it found all the silences.
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The whole track however plays normaly in Audacity, the level meter indicates normal dB always peaking at or slightly past the 0 dB where the thermometer color transitions from green to yellow to red and back to green.
I am puzzled here. Why is the file this way? Is it safe to play this file on any device? Can it mess up the sound decoder cicuit in my player in any way? Ofcourse, my question here is academic - this is not a serious production that has to be corrected; I can easily discard the file.