If you work for the RIAA, please turn your head and cough. I don’t want to listen to your whining. Go have a coffee or something.
What annoys the living #&*(! outta me lately is their latest anti-piracy tactic. They are flooding the file-sharing services with corrupted mp3’s. The result? You download a song, you play it, all seems well, you crank up the volume, and about half or three-quarters in, you get a sound that makes fingernails against a blackboard sound like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Forget the damage to my ears… the pet therapy bills have been immense.
I laud the movement by the programming community to come out with smalller, faster mp3 players for the Windows platform. The birth of Foobar, and even the optimization of Winamp have given hope that music players don’t have to be huge to be good, which brings me to my wish.
The “crap” that these jungle monkeys are inserting into mp3’s is nothing more than static and artificially generated computer synthesized noise. How difficult would it be to make an algorithm that inspected the waveform of an mp3 and detect isolated “loops” of high-volume noise. If you open one of these corrupted mp3’s in an editor like the Nero editor, it’s easy enough to see the corruption visually. On the waveform display it sticks out like a sore thumb.
I suppose it’s lofty of me to think that any of the Winamp or Foobar developers read this blog. But if you do… perhaps this is something to think about.