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Re: Ghostly Metadata

Subject: Re: Ghostly Metadata
From: "vickipowys" vpowys
Date: Sat May 1, 2010 11:13 pm ((PDT))
Greg,

Utterly spooky!

Vicki


On 02/05/2010, at 3:32 PM, greg.winterflood wrote:

> Hello all. Although my question is somewhat off topic for this
> Group, given the recent extensive discussion of metadata, I thought
> someone in the Group 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 It has since been replaced by an Olympus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 could play them on a Walkman
> mp3 player. Thinking I would bypass the sound card 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 the 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 when, after playing the recorded track for a
> minute to see how it sounded, Windows 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 song, an album
> name, plus album artwork. The album name and artwork was not the
> 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 something 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 through the copying process,
> something monitoring my PC would have had to recognize 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 associated
> with the music back to me.
>
> I've tried Googling for an explanation of this phenomenon but have
> had no luck so far. I remain somewhat spooked, and continue to
> wonder where the metadata came from, and how it found me?
>
>
> Greg Winterflood
>
>
>









"While a picture is worth a thousand words, a
sound is worth a thousand pictures." R. Murray Schafer via Bernie Krause


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