2022-05-16 from the editor of ~insom
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I've had an album in my MP3 collection since 2002 called
"AWDB Misc Tracks" (those are my initials by the way). It's
a set of mostly pirated music which I didn't want littering
my collection with bad ID3 tags, so I put it all under one
"Various Artists" album.
(The rest of my collection is legit, I'm not a big believer
in piracy and nowadays often buy music I can just stream for
"free" via music subscription).
Because it's low-quality stolen music it has some quirks: my
copy of "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" by Smashing Pumpkins
is tagged as "The World is a Vampire" which is definitely
not its name, but probably what someone searching on Napster
or Limewire would look for. At the 1m32s mark, the audio
gets noticably louder -- presumably this was recorded from
an analogue source (like tape or vinyl) and had the volume
cranked as the anonymous pirate realised the levels were too
low.
But why would you not just record it over again? Well my
theory is that, like another song in this compilation, it's
literally recorded off of FM radio. There were no do-overs.
Yeah, in the early days of MP3s there were non-trivial
amounts of MP3s which were "home taped" from the radio. (The
version of Lazy by X-Press 2 / David Byrne has got a BBC DJ
talking over the start and end, and "An Essential Collection
World Exclusive" audio cue at the start).
When my kids got MP3 players of their own as they grew up, I
often threw this on as test music or whatever to get them
started. I recently found out that my eldest has been
copying this album from player to player / computer to
computer since the mid-2000's and still has a version of
this. He also finds listening to the versions of these songs
without abrupt volume changes or random voice-overs jarring.
I have willed my own weird compilation album into being,
where the only market is my own family.
