Is there a way of comparing music files...

[divine`]

...to see if two different files of the 'same' file are the same?

Basically, someone has given me some 'blind test' files of a recording done with some old school gear, some new hardware and some software replication, however i'm suspicious that he's just trying to trick me as all the AIFF files are the same size.

Would opening them in Audacity or something show up any difference in the actual audio if there are any?

edit - though Audacity doesn't seem to get on well with AIFF files.

 

[Wang Computer]

Erm, script something yourself that generates an MD5 of each file's contents and compares the resulting hashes against one-another?

Other than that, I have no idea.

 

[simisker]

If he's used a DAW to create these example AIFFs for you, chances are he's just set a start and end point for recording/cutting the audio, and provided you with whatever was between these points for each track. And because AIFF is an uncompressed format, three audio tracks of exactly the same length will have exactly the same file size.

If you can't tell any difference using your ears [unlikely, to be honest], take one of the files, invert the phase [180 degrees] then add it to one of the remaining files with precisely equal levels. If they cancel each other out completely and you get silence, they're identical.

That's the theory. Don't know how to do that in Audacity, though.