Verify your music collection with AudioTester

If you have a considerable large collection of music and audio files on your computer or a storage device, you may at times want to verify it to make sure it is free of any issues.

It is advisable to verify new music files before you add it to your collection.

Files may become corrupt for example during transfers to a new location or download from the Internet, or tags may have been set improperly, for instance after running an automatic tagging program on your whole collection or a subset of it.

AudioTester is a free portable program for Windows that verifies supported audio files that you drop on its interface. It supports folders as well so that you can drop the root folder of your music collection on it to have all audio files tested in one go.

The scan is reasonably fast thanks to the program's use of all cpu cores but may still take a while depending on how many files need to be tested by it.

AudioTester displays the status of the scan, the total number of files and the file that is currently being tested.

The list of results is displayed in the program interface after the verification. All audio files with errors are listed at the top with errors displayed after the file path and name. Note that all tested audio files are listed but all error-free files are listed at the bottom without error displayed next to them.

The main issue that you will encounter is that AudioTester does not offer any explanation of errors which means that you may not know how to fix them.

What does truncated or lost sync mean for instance and how would you fix those errors. The developer's website offers no help and the readme file supplied with the program neither.

Since AudioTester does not offer any tools to correct the errors found, it is necessary to use other tools, for instance MP3 Val or MP3 Diag for that.

Since both programs mentioned support analysis as well, the only reason to run AudioTester and not those program directly is if at least part of your music collection uses other audio formats.

AudioTester supports mp3 but also Ogg Vorbis, Flac and WavPack files. The program is Open Source and the source code is included in the download.

It is possible to run the program from the command line by adding a file or folder path as an argument, e.g. audiotester c:\mp3.