A word processor like MS Word or LibreOffice Writer will probably refuse to open it, giving some error such as “unsupported file type.”
Depending on how much of a nerd you are, the plaintext editor your OS comes with may either also refuse to open it, or open it as if it were plaintext and you might see a few jumbles of letters and punctuation, or weird symbols if it interprets it as unicode. According to Vim, my mp3 copy of Glycerine by Bush is mostly @ symbols. I noticed that my Bash shell didn’t want to autocomplete “Vim glycerine.mp3” but when typed manually it did it with minimal fuss.
If you open it in a hex editor, you might be surprised to see the first few lines are readable, they likely contain metadata that media player software like VLC can understand, like the track name, artist, year of release and such. Scroll down further and you’ll start to see more gibberish where it’s trying to interpret the individual bytes that make up the audio as ASCII characters. Funnily enough hexedit gave me a different looking bunch of gibberish than Vim did.
Believe it or not, straight to jail
Open a text file in media player? Also straight to jail
The app will find the file incomprehensible and will tell you that the file is corrupted or in a format the app can’t understand.
An app that works with raw next (Windows’ Editor or notepad++ or any IDE) will try to parse the binary data as text and fail miserably, showing you lots of undecodable-unicode characters.
Example:
%.š /BûT¹Ò;lŠ^œ{åúvž’Û X“—دa%“9HúU”¿ú¦¥N̉ČԿ†«dd’º•©“ÜÈê*è9$mÕ lfN‹„‘ª$bÿû°@§ gÂqâ`tŒøn<cm-‰ Ljmð3¡|ñ°k§û–ÿîo<©ªxgTZ¯óT†"x¦1Q®ÔÚóI# 3édgþ™>´dʶÌþB…o™ÜË7bMûö”]«ê|= ®©w„Ïɳ²NdÅh˜Ñ#´¦ïÕ®ºAd`‹®«R²•]‡ÐÏE päX 0PÛnE”Ø΋şçÒñD]îbwNðèB$¤“nnzráiqÖ›XåÄvØÉË \ø\¦P¼¶Xæ‰Â6…”ææ†?äÖåœ:m|?B3C+dW»f†`Ê$Lˆmìóz¯xK>‘)ƒÜÉTÝ ¨@‘ Š£Ð:¨õ¹|!„D QC#£ö ªJ¼×u›³ÕÒ©˜gV"!V«; áäi³EJ…3;zã[±0&ËsÖ_Ë·³‡ ó8MaTô”ÖBïKßïùl4zHJE’N¢ìo™iÒg$½›—U.ºtÉW›SXGÓÐŒ§N¢–L¨YþïZOPNìÌÙŸN ŽŠióyÄ,QÍfÙ¬
But is sound reproducible this way?
Imagine you have a book that’s written in Korean. If you gave it to me and asked me to read it out loud, I wouldn’t be able to make sense out of it. If you gave it to a Korean person, however, they could read it perfectly fine.
The book itself hasn’t changed — just the person reading the book. And that person has a different set of skills (or instructions, if you will).
What do you even mean by that?
The text program obviously can’t process and play the audio, it will try to open the file as if it contains text.
But it’s not like opening the file destroys it. You can still just close the text program, and then open the file using a suitable media program instead.
Here’s the thing: Let’s say your text editor interprets the file as ASCII.
Several characters in the ASCII table aren’t printable. The first 32 characters in the table are control characters, so they don’t get displayed on screen as text you could copy and paste. So if you opened an audio file in a text editor as an ASCII file, copied the text, pasted it in another text field, then saved that file, any bytes that were between 0 and 32 decimal would be missing.
I know.
I didn’t claim you could do that.
I said you could close the file and open it using something else. Not save and then open it using something else.
I am assuming it inputs the byte stream of the file to the text parser and only glibberish comes out
my afternoon project recommendation is to open a jpg or bmp in audacity, cut the first bit off to save the header then apply random audio effects to the rest. you can create really cool trippy glitch art this way
Wouldnt removing the header mess with reading the file?
I think they’re saying snip the header off so you don’t affect it, then reapply at the end.
MP4 is video.
Do you mean MP3?
MP4 can be audio too
Why yes, video containers typically support audio tracks.
And you could encode such files with only an audio track.
But why would you?
I dunno, ask Apple. I just said it can be done, not that I actively do so
Better audio compression codec than the mp3 standard?
Video containers don’t determine codec. You can use any video codec as well as any audio codec. Which means the audio inside an mp4 can be mp3, or flac, or aac, or wav…
If you’re just storing audio, just use an audio file directly. Putting the same exact audio stream inside a video container just makes it slightly more difficult to play, because them you can’t use a lot of audio players to play the audio.
It’ll likely crash the editor, but if it doesn’t then you get cool Matrix code. That’s actually how we used to make Matrix backgrounds back in the day, open an image in a text editor, copy the code, transform it to vertical, change it to green, eureka!
But what is all that crap? Is that the literal machine code or something? Like what is it and in the eff does it actually goid-enough approximate its subject content?
Every single file on a computer is stored as zeros and ones, the difference between opening a file in VLC or in Notepad is how the program decode the data.
I actually have a very good analogy to explain the issue of decoding data, this happened to me in a shop.
I am a Swede, I consider myself being bilingual Swedish/English, I live and work in Sweden.
After work one day I decided that I wanted some Itallian food so I walked by Eatatly in Stockholm.
As I got to the cashier to pay, I thought I heard her speak Swedish, but as she started talking to me, I only heard gibberish, I could not understand her at all, it took me 2-3 sec to realize that she was speaking English, and when that clicked, I suddenly understood everything.
It was so weird, it was like my English comprehension was just turned off and needed to restart.
Now, this is bascially what happens when you try and open a music file in Notepad, only it can’t understand music at all and doesn’t have the option to give up unless it hits a hard limit.
So it uses what it knows to try and decode thw file, it takes the birnary data and decodes it as a text file, and since the music data does not corespond to proper text standards it will just do it’s best and give you a long document of incomprehensable characters.
There are some interesting ways to mess with files and different programs to find/do interesting stuff.
For instance, you can hide a zip file in a JPG file: https://www.howtogeek.com/119365/how-to-hide-zip-files-inside-a-picture-without-any-extra-software/
This would only really work in hiding small ammounts of data, and will not prevent detection by law enforcement.
.docx, .xlsx, .pptx and other new office documents are actually zip files, you can open the file in 7zip and examine the file that way.
This is interesting, but I haven’t found a real use for it.
Every file is made up of zeroes and ones, what’s different between the formats is how those zeroes and ones are interpreted. When you open a mp4 in a text editor what you see is the result of the text editor interpreting the data as if it were text. Since the data doesn’t actually represent text, the result is meaningless garbage.
All any file is is just numbers. Opening a file in a program is just interpreting those numbers. To over-simplify, in a plain text file, for example, the number 32 means “space character”, and the number 10 means “move down to a new line”. In an audio file, the numbers are going to have meaning related to volume and frequency of sound, at points in time.
