naturerecordists
[Top] [All Lists]

Ghostly Metadata

Subject: Ghostly Metadata
From: "greg.winterflood" greg.winterflood
Date: Sat May 1, 2010 10:37 pm ((PDT))
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 It has since been replaced by an Olympus LS-10 digital recorder.=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







<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the naturerecordists mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU