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Re: Ghostly Metadata

Subject: Re: Ghostly Metadata
From: "Wolodymyr Smishkewych" wjsmish=
k
Date: Sun May 2, 2010 5:39 am ((PDT))

Greg, that us creepy. Out of curiosity, when is the tape itself from
(year)? I'm curious to know if indeed there is a way to have encoded
in some part of the cassette tape or in an inaudible fequency? I have
a Technics home audio player which has CD and cassette capabilities
and can read CD-Text. I'd like to test tapes to see if they have any
embedded album/track info. The other thought is that Gracenote/CDDB
have some way to recognize tracks via the first few seconds of their
audio signal content.

Cheers,
Vlad

Sent from my iPod

On 2 May 2010, at 02:11, vickipowys <> wrote:

> 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 It has since been replaced by an Olympus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
> >
> >
> >
>









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