I know this is crazy but my MP3s seem to be getting lower quality as time goes on. Some of them have faint snaps and cracks and blips and parts where the volume seems to go up and down ever so slightly. Others are sounding muffled as if they were recorded from a recording sort of thing. It seems every couple of weeks I notice that another one of my MP3s has a new 'artifact' that I could have sworn wasnt there before. The older they are, the worse they are (some of my MP3s are probably 10 years old!) This has been going on very gradually (for years?) and I just finally got fed up enough to ask about it. I know computer files dont work like that, but what is going on? Anyone else experience this?

If you have them on CDs that degraded, or the disk got corrupted, or similar, then yes.

mp3 file format is not validated nor structured. You can rename any file as mp3 and try to play it. Decoder simply reads block after block, and if it finds a few bits that it believes mark the beginning of the fragment, it tries to play it.

As such, if there is something wrong with your storage, the decoder will not complain.

Another possibility is that old mp3s used inferior encoding techniques, which resulted in worse sound quality. As drivers and software evolve, the psychoacoustic profiles might be getting mismatched, or the poor quality of original compression (mp3 is lossy after all) becomes more perceptible.

As you listen for more recent recordings which make up quality via volume, listening to older recordings raises your attention to subtle anomalies that you never perceived before.

Also, as you age, your hearing changes. It generally begins by loss of high-frequencies, and starts in 20s. There really are tones that teenagers can hear that others can't.

You have to buy a new mp3 playing needle and install it in your computer.

Also, the older MP3s were probably encoded really poorly, and new decoders have made compromises in dealing with those encodings in order to suit some optimization for the new ones.

Quote: Original post by Ravuya
You have to buy a new mp3 playing needle and install it in your computer.

The needle probably isn't the culprit, it can last a good 10 years without much noticeable degradation. You may need to clean your MP3s tho; open your MP3 player / computer and use some warm water and soap to clean the hard drive where the MP3s are. Try to go in circles on the disc from where one song starts to where it ends - it works best if you thoroughly clean one song at a time rather then the whole thing in a single wipe.

Quote: Original post by Koobazaur
The needle probably isn't the culprit, it can last a good 10 years without much noticeable degradation. You may need to clean your MP3s tho; open your MP3 player / computer and use some warm water and soap to clean the hard drive where the MP3s are. Try to go in circles on the disc from where one song starts to where it ends - it works best if you thoroughly clean one song at a time rather then the whole thing in a single wipe.

But make sure not to touch the area where the jpegs of your porn collection last holidays are stored. They might appear washed out if you're not careful. All this bit-ink is water-soluble, or so they say.

Make sure to keep your mp3s in a dry environment and out of direct sunlight.

You wouldn't have this problem if you had used MP3-beating compression...

Try taking MD5 hashes of all your MP3s, then compare a few months later to see if your hard drive is slowly dying.

Obviously, it's microscopic space pipes sucking little pieces of your MP3s up and sending them to Mars.

Quote: Original post by Oberon_Command
Obviously, it's microscopic space pipes sucking little pieces of your MP3s up and sending them to Mars.

Ridiculous ! It's common knowledge that microscopic space pipes (MSP) cannot suck up MP3s due to the highly entropic nature of the latter. MSP suck up WAVs and maybe FLACs, but never MP3s. You really should have known that.