Quote:Original post by AndreTheGiant Wow I cant believe that about 95% of you actually took the time to post stupid (sometimes elaborate) nonesense thinking it was funny. Also I have no idea why I would have gotten rated down for posting this question...
I think this might have to do with the way you formulated your question. It kind of seemed like you were asking for it... Perhaps some people even assumed you were a troll, hence the rating down.
I think you should consider Rattenhirn's answer!
Also, have you tried playing the files on a different computer? Maybe your sound system is the one going bad and it just happens as a coincidence that it is more noticeable on some of the older songs you own...
Of course harddrive bits just don't flip like that. Parts of the HDD can in fact degrade over time, due to chemical reactions of the surface, due to mechanical shocks or just due to normal wear and tear. However, the drive will automatically remap these bad sectors before data gets lost, and you will not even realize that something happened. This is a normal part of a HDD life. Of course this doesn't affect the data integrity of the file system. If bits start randomly flipping on your HDD beyond this, corrupting the FS, then you have a serious hardware malfunction and the drive should be immediately replaced. As you said, such errors would have much more massive consequences than just corrupting MP3s, especially on executable files. In normal operation however, the integrity of the data on disk is always 100%. Not 99.99%, but 100.0%. Data will always be exactly the same, bit for bit.
Just to be sure, run a full surface diagnostic of your HDD. If everything is fine, it could be some other things. As others mentioned, it could indeed by psychological. If your brain gets used to higher quality recordings, then suddenly listening to an old lower quality one will make errors apparent that the brain just interpolated over in the past. I have seen this happening to me quite a few times. Or it could be a problem with your sound card or audio subsystem. Have you tried listening to the same MP3s on some other device ?
Let's put it this way, Andre - if your mp3's went sour because of data corruption on the hard drive, you'd either be very lucky to have a fully functional operating system or your mp3's would be the least of your concern.
I kinda know what you might be talking about, thought - unfortunately (or fortunately) the problem is much like a programming problem: it's not corrupt memory nor the hard drive, it's not the operating system, it's not the video card or its drivers; it's you and your bad code (well, 99.99999% of the time life's like that anyway :D). Or in this case, more likely, an encoding issue you might have previously missed. For instance, make sure you don't have two versions of the same song in your library (one of which might be faulty or different quality).
To explain all the fun-making in this thread: digitally speaking, there's no such thing as "loss of quality" and digital information doesn't "age" or cause your songs to be come "muffled". It becomes corrupt and that's it. Of course, there is a distinct possibility that your music library might be sitting on a bunch of bad sectors - in which case you should run a full scan of your hard drive, like Yann wrote.
Or perhaps you recently upgraded your sound system and are finally hearing that anything below 192kbps is for noobcaeks?
It is quite possible that this is a purely psychological phenomenon.
I remember a similar effect having been postulated by a researcher a 7-8 years ago in respect chemotherapy. He argued that according to research results, there is a new therapy that is superior to the gold standard by 5-10% every few months. Consequentially, therapy must be 10 to 20 times better today than the gold standard 10 years ago, which evidently is not the case. He attributed this to a combination of Rosenthal effect and placebo, and possibly wrong perception of actual results.
Coming back to your MP3s, it may be that you just perceive them getting worse because a) you hear recordings in better quality b) you expect the old ones to be worse
