MP3 Corruption for years

[draticus]

Has anyone ever heard of someone having mp3s frequently develop glitches? This has been happening to me for over 10 years now. I back up my mp3s once every couple of years so I can often go to a backup and replace the corrupted mp3 but if its an mp3 I've downloaded in the past year or so I have to replace it. The mp3s still play but they develop loud blips or sometimes develop skips where a second or so of sound will repeat and replace the second that was supposed to follow. This problem has followed me across many hard drives and operating systems. I've never had any data loss or corruption of executables or other media types, only mp3s.

Usually the glitches are very small, most people wouldn't even notice, but I know they weren't always there because when I go back to a backup of the same file the glitch is not there.

I've always had up to date antivirus. I don't understand how this problem could follow me across so many systems.

[Marcin]

Doesn't happen to me.

[RockStrongo]

Has anyone ever heard of someone having mp3s frequently develop glitches? This has been happening to me for over 10 years now. I back up my mp3s once every couple of years so I can often go to a backup and replace the corrupted mp3 but if its an mp3 I've downloaded in the past year or so I have to replace it. The mp3s still play but they develop loud blips or sometimes develop skips where a second or so of sound will repeat and replace the second that was supposed to follow. This problem has followed me across many hard drives and operating systems. I've never had any data loss or corruption of executables or other media types, only mp3s.

Usually the glitches are very small, most people wouldn't even notice, but I know they weren't always there because when I go back to a backup of the same file the glitch is not there.

I've always had up to date antivirus. I don't understand how this problem could follow me across so many systems.

Maybe you're just crazy...

[draticus]

If it's an error in my perception then I'm completely bat shit crazy and so are two of my roommates. They suddenly develop blips as if they're being played off of a scratched record. These are mp3s I've had for years and listened to thousands of times. The blips are not decoding errors, once they appear they remain in the same place no matter how many times you play the same section over. When I go to a disk backup the older version of the same file does not have the error.

Obviously I do not think there is some of sort of "decay" going on. Something is corrupting the files. If its the drives then why do I keep having the problem on new machines? And why wouldn't any executables stop working? If it were just data corruption when I copy my mp3s to new drives then I wouldn't suddenly notice commonly listened to mp3s going bad on a machine I've had for a year. I considered the player - I've always used winamp. If winamp were corrupting data I think I would have heard about it. The only other thing I can think of would be a virus but I've always had virus protection so it couldn't be anything mainstream. Its possible that it could be a non proliferating virus thats been tagging along with me in an old game or something since college but isn't in any virus database. Doesn't seem likely though.

Anyway, I'm throwing this out there in the off chance that someone has heard of this problem before.

[blargh312]

Frequently copying your files will lead to degradation, no matter what the file type. Eventually this can lead to corruption or total loss of data (although that's a very extreme case). This is sometimes more obvious in mp3 files because of the way encoders remove data from the file when converted. When you copy these mp3s (or even worse, transcode them), there's a possibility for compression artifacts in the file to become more noticeable as pops or hissing or some other kind of imperfection.

[halpfultroll]

I don't hear this but when I first read the title, I thought this would be about songs that have hidden messages in it trying to corrupt the listeners (like playing songs backwards).

[Deleted]

OMG It's the new world order!

I don't hear this but when I first read the title, I thought this would be about songs that have hidden messages in it trying to corrupt the listeners (like playing songs backwards).

Thats what came into my head too.

[draticus]

The assumption that it has to either be drive failure or my imagination is very wrong.

Option 3: A virus.
Option 4: When winamp is writing to the file to change its ID3 tag it could be messing up and corrupting another part of the file.

I was hoping for a 5th option that I hadn't thought of. There are so many programs on any given computer that read and write to the hard drive and some of them are even interacting and changing things like the ID3 tag on the mp3s in question. It is not unthinkable that something is not working as intended and is damaging these mp3s.

Keep the ideas coming please.