Delicious audio file spectrograms.

spectro is a collection of easy-to-use Python and command-line tools for analyzing audio files. Install from PyPi with

pip install spectro

and use with

spectro show filename.mp3                # shows the wave spectrum of the audio file
spectro check {dirname or filename.mp3}  # checks if the audio file is worse than it pretends to be

See -h for their respective command-line arguments.

The quality of MP3 files is typically determined by their bitrate. For audio files, 128 kbps (kilobit per second) is considered low quality, 320 kbps is considered high quality. It is of course possible to re-encode a low-quality MP3 with a higher bitrate or even a WAV file. spectro can help singling out those foul eggs.

Here is the spectro show output of a sample file (only first channel shown):

Full-quality WAV	320 kbps MP3	256 kbps MP3
192 kbps MP3	128 kbps MP3	96 kbps MP3
64 kbps MP3	32 kbps MP3	16 kbps MP3