Hello all. Although my question is somewhat off topic for this Group, given=
the recent extensive discussion of metadata, I thought someone in the Grou=
p might have an explanation for the happening described below.
I began recording birdsong in 2003 with a Marantz PMD222 mono cassette tape=
-recorder. It has since been replaced by an Olympus LS-10 digital recorder.=
Recently I began to copy some of my favourite old music tapes so that I co=
uld play them on a Walkman mp3 player. Thinking I would bypass the sound ca=
rd on the PC and avoid a lot of other fiddling around I played a music tape=
on the Marantz and connected its Line-Out to the Line-In of the Olympus. I=
set the Olympus to record mp3 at 320kbps. I did not record each song on th=
e music tape separately, but just let the tape run from start to finish and=
so ended up with one long mp3 track.
After recording Side One of the music tape, I used a USB cable to transfer =
the mp3 recording to Windows Media Player on my PC. Imagine my surprise whe=
n, after playing the recorded track for a minute to see how it sounded, Win=
dows Media Player popped up with the correct name of the first song on Side=
One of the music tape. It also gave me the name of the composer of the son=
g, an album name, plus album artwork. The album name and artwork was not th=
e same as the album I had copied, though it was by the same artist.
My ADSL connection to the Internet was on while this happened. I assume som=
ething was able to monitor the music I was playing in Windows Media Player.=
However, unless there is metadata on the music tape, which was preserved t=
hrough the copying process, something monitoring my PC would have had to re=
cognize some part of my copy of the taped music, and somehow match it to a =
specimen of music stored on its database, and then send the metadata associ=
ated with the music back to me.
I've tried Googling for an explanation of this phenomenon but have had no l=
uck so far. I remain somewhat spooked, and continue to wonder where the met=
adata came from, and how it found me?
Greg Winterflood
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