Still chipping away at the things I said I was working on in the previous post, but I've been meaning to be better about updating the journal, so here's another fun post. The not-really-fun context: my grandma has fairly late stage lung cancer and has moved in with us to hopefully have a better quality of life going out. This has naturally made things a little screwy around the house, but it's also provided a more fun opportunity to snoop and larp as a digital archaeologist. Rather than simply throw out a lot of her burned media (which, no joke, she's worrying about being super illegal and coming back to haunt us because she's 81), my mom handed them off to me in case I wanted to reuse the jewel cases. Naturally, I went looking through them instead.
A lot of these discs comes from this time she was dating a skeevy dude named Herb. This would've been when I was little, so the early 2000s. (I did indeed get one of Herb's wank CD-Rs. It was marked with a single "x" on the label side. No, I did not watch any of it. The CD was immediately cracked in half and discarded as soon as I saw "heather4.mpeg" and "jizz.mpeg" in the list of files.) The less odious ones were, of course, of pirated MP3s! This was 2002, and what were you doing if not downloading a bunch of music from LimeWire and getting your computer nice and infected? (Or watching porn. I guess.)
As you can imagine, the selections were either classic rock or more contemporary pop rock. The photo up there is of a random one from the pile with the single shittiest song selection I have ever seen (what kind of mix puts "Wonderful Tonight" next to fucking "Brick", or "Ice Ice Baby" next to "Sex and Candy"?). It's those misspellings, though, that make it retardkino. I needed you to know someone legitimately put "Margurittaville" by "Jim Buffet" down on a piece of paper, and I held it in my hands.
Most of these were audio CD burns, and I tossed most of them because, funny labels aside, I just don't need audio CD burns of MP3s. One, though, was special, and I am keeping. Dated December 15, 2002, this one was a data CD featuring the MP3s those other discs were made from instead. (I can tell because of the shared misspellings between the paper inserts for the audio CDs and the misspelled file names on the data disc.) Yes, it still plays perfectly.
One screenshot cannot do it justice. Admittedly, none are as good as Jim Buffet ("Bar Room Blitz" comes close though), but nevertheless, here's the full list of 174 vintage LimeWire MP3s and misspellings for your perusal and amusement.
Illiteracy aside, there's a sort of 2000s middle American family music canon that I feel like this stuff represents a nice cross section of, where everyone from Ricky Martin to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Linkin Park to Ja Rule to Jimmy Buffett, Eric Clapton, Golden Earring, Hall & Oates, Dixie Chicks, Waylon Jennings, etc. is represented. None of it is super deep, all of it is very recognizable, and again, it's a neat crash course in the kinda stuff that I think was most often passed around on LimeWire, spelled incorrectly and at 128kbps. (It also honest to God introduced me to a song! "Adrenaline", as credited to Bush on this disc, is actually a Gavin Rossdale solo track I'd never heard before from the xXx soundtrack, and it's pretty sweet.)
There was one thing that hit me with all this though. If you know me from my other writings on autistic audio minutia, you know where this is going: what were these encoded with?
I obviously was not about to check all 174, but I picked out seven. One MP3 was from 1999, and two each from 2000, 2001, and 2002. I checked them with my trusty mp3guessenc, which looks for clues in the metadata and way the MP3 was encoded (block size, stereo encoding preferences per-frame, etc) to make an educated guess at which program it came from. Here were the results, from oldest to most recent!
wonderful.mp3[Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight"]: From 10/10/99, this was the biggest surprise. I've never seen mp3guessenc suggest a file was encoded by a dist10 encoder, but that was the case for this one. Granted, the official documentation doesn't list dist10-alikes as being one of the detectable encoders, and the wording from the output is "by dist10 encoder or other encoder", so I think it just doesn't know what the hell program made this. Nevertheless, with how good this program is at detecting encoders (seriously, mp3guessenc can even discern Blade-encoded MP3s, and that was based on dist10), dist10-based is probably not off the mark.Dave Matthews Band - What Would You Say.mp3: 04/09/00, and encoded with a Fraunhofer codec through the ACM framework in Windows. These were super common either as MusicMatch Jukebox encodes or from bootleg encoder frontends using the stolen Fraunhofer ACM encoder.Eminem - The Real Slim Shady - [x rated version].mp3: A month later, 05/10/00. I fucking love the metadata attached to this one. Genre is "Trailer", album is "NOT OUT YET-WHO CARES", and comment is "THIS SUCKS-AT LEAST ITS FREE!!". Identical to the album version as far as I can tell. The single had been out since April, but I don't know if it would've been censored on there or not. If not, it came from there, but if it was, this is a really late leak, since The Marshall Mathers LP would be out 13 days later. Either way, fun to see. Another ACM encode.Lynard Skynard - Call Me the Breeze.mp3[that would be Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Call Me the Breeze"]: Dated 01/16/01, another Fraunhofer ACM encode.Dido - Thank You - Sliding Doors.mp3: 03/14/01! The "Sliding Doors" refers to the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, which "Thank You" was written for. This one's interesting—mp3guessenc identifies it as a "very old" version of Xing! There's a lot of nerd information that mp3guessenc gives you alongside its final diagnosis, also. It's identified an incomplete, corrupt frame in this file (which nonetheless usually isn't audible because frames last fractions of a second), and you also get a frame histogram showing the most common bitrates throughout the file (remember, MP3s can vary their bitrate for smaller files/better quality). This was 96kbps CBR, and because Xing always punched above its weight class, I honestly thought it sounded fine. Lossy, but fine. Impressive stuff.Ramones - I Wanna Be Sedated.mp3: Into 2002, from 02/11/02. Here's another Fraunhofer encode, but it's not an ACM encode, but rather from l3enc, fastenc, or mp3enc. These were Fraunhofer's earlier standalone encoders back when MP3 was still largely being targeted at professional use. Yes, this program is so good, it can tell the difference between Fraunhofer encoders.Rollin Stones-Honky Tonk Woman.mp3[no, not a cover band involving Henry Rollins, just the Rolling Stones]: The metadata gives the title for this one as "Honkey Tonk Woman", ah well, so close. 04/20/2002! Another Xing encode, this time from a "new" version of Xing! I'm always happy to see Xing whenever it pops up. It's still a damn fine encoder and was super fast in my encoding tests for that page.
