Quote: Original post by Yann L

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.

That's correct, but at the same time, I'd say, if you are cleaning the MP3s you might as well clean the JPEGs too, they degrade over time as well. That's where the artifacts come from.

Porn collection comprised of jpg photos? What is this, the 50's? We have realtime streaming videos now, dammit!

Quote: Original post by Yann L

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.

MP3 has some low-entropy regions though, most notably the tags, which are plain text. If an MSP happens to open in such a low-entropy region, it causes both mechanical and electromagnetic strain on the surrounding regions of the medium, leading to slight degradation.

The 'degradation effect' has been observed many times and is well documented so do not be too worried. It is the variety of exploding mp3s that are currently not well-understood and a subject of active inquiry. You can probably imagine that these are actually quite dangerous, since to date, no one has been able develop a reliable 'tell-tale' that would serve as an indication that the mp3 is about to undergo rapid and spontaneous decomposition. Exploding mp3's will normally take out a platter of the HD, and due to the high spin-rate of modern drives, it is entirely possible for the platter ceramic to breach the aluminium enclosure, sending out a sort of spray of platter shrapnel soup throughout the room/ office etc. Obviously this can be quite unfriendly to any warm bodied humans that might also be caught up in the path [orthogonal to the axis of drive rotation]. Although a better understanding of these events and triggers would be desirable (the last I heard was that new research is pending) they are reasonably rare, and therefore deemed not a cause for excessive alarm.

That's why I zip my mp3's when I'm not using them - keeps them safe.

It's funny, I've thought the same after I've recovered my MP3 collection from a damaged HD: the data from the damaged sectors definitely "degraded" their quality. It was strange, I thought that in this time and age, degradation of audio media was a thing of the past.

One MP3, "RMB - Whispering", has taken damage in such a way that there are 2 new scratching noises that really fit greatly into the song. This is now a very valuable piece of degraded MP3 for me. [smile]

Many people mistake the gradual "degradation" that mp3s and other media files undergo, as simple file corruption and a lowering of the quality and thus of the value.

Another view of these phenomena is, that what is happening is actually patination, a discrete aging of objects which preserved correctly, in time will make them more valuable:

Quote: Wikipedia.org on the value of Patina

Apart from the aesthetic appearance and practical protection of patination, antique experts confirm that an object's value increases when its patination is intact because it is an important effect of the aging process and this evidential history is reflected in the value of the piece.

When I find that some of my mp3s have aged in a tasteful and pleasant way, I copy them to a separate folder named "mp3 (antique)". One day, I'll sell my antique mp3 collection of progressive rock classics and it'll be worth a fortune!

Just make sure they're all legal or the only thing you'll be doing is faxing them back to RIAA.

PS - there's a critical point where mp3's do not age properly anymore, but become stale. At which point they really aren't good for listening anymore, but rather just looking at.

Quote: Original post by irreversible
That's why I zip my mp3's when I'm not using them - keeps them safe.

I used to do that too, but it soon became a burden to unzip them each time I wanted to play them. It makes me wonder why media players don't support automatic unzipping.

What I do now is check the expiration date (which you can find on the bottom side of the mp3), and make a copy before the music goes bad. I've written a small ruby script that does the checking and copying for me, I run it every week or so, has been working nicely for a few months now. I could send it to you if you want.

Quote: Original post by SamLowry
It makes me wonder why media players don't support automatic unzipping.

foobar2000 does.