Btw, what exactly do you mean by "transcoded nonsense"?
I mean the files I found are .m4a files that are 320kbps variable bitrate. When decoded and analyzed in adobe audition, you can see where the frequency cutoff is, and it is indicative of a 128kbps file that was converted to a 320kbps file. This is what transcoded means.
A CD wave file has a frequency response range up to 22.5kHz. When you compress losslessly, like with flac, this changes nothing the waveform is identical to the source. When you compress with a lossy codec like mp3, amounts of these frequencies are removed depending on the bitrate used. 320kbps will retain all frequencies up to 20kHz, where there will be a sharp cutoff and nothing left above that point. But lower frequencies like 128kbps, a very popular bitrate when people had slower internet connections remove all the frequencies above 16kHz. So if a person foolishly thinks converting the 128kbps file to 320kbps will improve the audio (it will not), the file can be inspected in this way to see where the frequency cutoff is. In this case, the cutoff is right at 16.5kHz, meaning the files were indeed once a lower bitrate than they are now.
This page explains how to do this better than I can:
interviewfor.red/en/spectrals.html
I converted the files to V5 so they can't continue to spread as fake 320 files.
Spectral of the transcoded 320 .m4a file:
Spectral of the converted mp3:
The fact they look nearly identical tells you that the mp3 encoder didn't find anything to eliminate when converting back down to 136kbps.
501: pixeldrain.com/u/FWGJ5shY
503: pixeldrain.com/u/KQoKBNHv
