mp3's that won't play

if an mp3 simply can't be played in any music program, what are some possible reasons for this complication? i sent like 3 files to someone (compression into a RAR file was involved), and on his end, two of them can't be played, yet they work fine for me. is something fucking them up between point A and B? it's the first time this has happened to me

i've heard old files can degrade but that's certainly not your case...

  On 1/18/2011 at 3:48 AM, yek said:

i've heard old files can degrade but that's certainly not your case...

i've heard that too, but i swear it's gotta be the hardware it's written to that makes it sound degraded. a flac file supposedly maintains perfect form forever, but a lossy file doesn't based on this theory. which i don't entirely get. they are both just sequences of code, what exactly would make one more "unstable" than the other?

  On 1/18/2011 at 3:54 AM, Calx Sherbet said:

  On 1/18/2011 at 3:48 AM, yek said:

i've heard old files can degrade but that's certainly not your case...

 

i've heard that too, but i swear it's gotta be the hardware it's written to that makes it sound degraded. a flac file supposedly maintains perfect form forever, but a lossy file doesn't based on this theory. which i don't entirely get. they are both just sequences of code, what exactly would make one more "unstable" than the other?

larger files??? fuck if i know

Either a) your .rar became corrupted in the process somehow or b) you and him/her are using different programs to play the files and in such case either his program is crap or your files are crap but your software plays them anyway and his doesn't. Option c) is that he's simply a fucking tool and somehow managed to destroy the files.

It's possible to verify the integrity of your mp3s - with foo_verifier for example if you use foobar2000. Or you can compare md5s or other checksums. The "files degrade in compression" assumption is practically false. If you don't believe me, start compressing and uncompressing and wait until you get a different checksum for the compressed file(s). I think you'll die before that happens.

  On 1/18/2011 at 3:54 AM, Calx Sherbet said:

  On 1/18/2011 at 3:48 AM, yek said:

i've heard old files can degrade but that's certainly not your case...

i've heard that too,

I certainly haven't heard that?! I mean aside from the hard disk itself failing, files don't just degrade because they're a bit old

They do, and it's one of man's greatest technological mysteries. I grabbed a few mp3s uploaded to this Dutch FTP in late '95 and they just sounded like the Family Fortunes buzzer through a ring modulator in a show cave. On sourceforge search up MPolisher3 Pro, there should be a binary for whatever OS you're using. I'm not sure exactly how it does it, but I guess it's the same principle as regrouting your bathroom tiles. I just tell the software where my music folder is and scheduled it to clean up my tunes 2PM every Monday when I'm asleep. If you do the same then they'll sound, as their slogan says, "Like they were freshly ripped this morning." Sometimes the results sound better than a WAV, in my opinion anyway.

Man, great post

flol

unmarked bad sectors on B side hard drive

I would re-rarify and resend them. they probably either became corrupted when you compressed them to a rar or when you sent them through the tubes.

digital dust I tell thee

archive them again, without compression.

codecs

  On 1/18/2011 at 3:48 AM, yek said:

i've heard old files can degrade but that's certainly not your case...

How is that even possible?

  On 1/18/2011 at 6:51 PM, azatoth said:

  On 1/18/2011 at 3:48 AM, yek said:

i've heard old files can degrade but that's certainly not your case...

 

How is that even possible?

  On 1/18/2011 at 4:25 PM, nene multiple assgasms said:

I would re-rarify and resend them. they probably either became corrupted when you compressed them to a rar or when you sent them through the tubes.

This. There are also a handful of programs that can validate the integrity of mp3 files, including foobar, mp3val, and EncSpot.

Fact: OP uses iTunes