Found a utility to identify MQA FLAC files

[Dunring]

I just switched from Tidal to Qobuz since they don't support MQA, and I'd rather subscribe to a place that isn't paying royalties for it (more for the artists). I wanted to find out which of my library were actually MQA, and on Github there's a command line one here. You have to run it in a command prompt window, and it's "MQA_identifier.exe *.flac" in the same folder as the files, but you can use DOS pipes to send it to a text file with "MQA_identifier.exe *.flac > results.txt" Then I loaded into a Libreoffice spreadsheet, so you can sort it from the data menu by column and just have a list of the MQA ones. Probably should have tried the " | sort " filter to make it even simpler.
Just keeping foobar volume down a little (or EQ) disables MQA playback on the DAC, but it was interesting in case I want to do some blind testing later. Just to know which files actually have it, instead of watching the indicator on the E50 display. Feel better not paying into it anyway (got the DAC used).

 

[pjug]

Did you find any MQA on Qobuz? I thought there were almost none. I would be very surprised in my Qobuz library but I am too lazy to go through the process you describe.

 

[BeerBear]

Good find. There's also mqaid, which does the same thing, but it runs in Python. I don't know if they use the same identification method or not.

MQA encodes definitely shouldn't be on Qobuz or anywhere else where the music is supposed to be in a lossless format. But you never know... mistakes can happen etc... these tools are for double checking.

 

[boxerfan88]

Is it true that MQA identifier is not just in the header metadata, but they have markers inside the content area?

If true, is there any tool that also scan the content area?

 

[Galliardist]

If you want to rest anything like that, most of the files uploaded to Qobuz from the 2L label are in MQA format.

Qobuz doesn’t support MQA but allows it.

 

[tsch]

I just switched from Tidal to Qobuz since they don't support MQA, and I'd rather subscribe to a place that isn't paying royalties for it (more for the artists). I wanted to find out which of my library were actually MQA, and on Github there's a command line one here. You have to run it in a command prompt window, and it's "MQA_identifier.exe *.flac" in the same folder as the files, but you can use DOS pipes to send it to a text file with "MQA_identifier.exe *.flac > results.txt" Then I loaded into a Libreoffice spreadsheet, so you can sort it from the data menu by column and just have a list of the MQA ones. Probably should have tried the " | sort " filter to make it even simpler.
Just keeping foobar volume down a little (or EQ) disables MQA playback on the DAC, but it was interesting in case I want to do some blind testing later. Just to know which files actually have it, instead of watching the indicator on the E50 display. Feel better not paying into it anyway (got the DAC used).

Unfortunately the output doesn't contain the foldername.
I have subfolders for artists consisting of subfolders with albums. Is there any possibility to scan a complete folder with subfolders and show the folder being able to identify albums with MQA-crap?