10.24.07
Strange comments in mp3 files
I did have a post about how I didn’t hate Windows media Player quite as much as I did last week having used it for a little while and found some useful things, however….
As I was looking through some Unknown Artist files, I noticed some funny items in the Comments section of the mp3 tags. They look like hexadecimal numbers, here is one as an example: 00001A39 00001801 00007A8B 00008713 00030D57 00030D57 00008000 00008000 00009C85 0001ADC7
At first I wondered if these were something added for tracking mp3s through p2p networks, which would make sense. A company could add comments, and then share them, and then track their dissemination. I have some files which I’ve downloaded, so that was possible, but i checked a little further.
These numbers appear in the comments to each and every one of my mp3s! Include those I’ve ripped from CDs I own! Now I’m pretty sure cDex hasn’t added them (I’ll rip something this afternoon and see), and I have a few mp3s on my laptop that WMP has seen nothing of, so I imported one and…. the magic comment numbers appeared!
I suspect they might be a way for the internal WMP library tracks files, but surely they could be used for far more things, many of which are EVIL EVIL EVIL!
