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Is it possible to open and save a music as a text file? (1 Viewer)

Christ Reynolds

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as long as you dont change the contents of the data, you can change the extension to whatever you want. you dont even have to have an extension at all. once you change the data inside, the mp3 probably wont work anymore.

CJ
 

Mark Giles

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So theoretically, given you have access to all text characters, you can creat a high quality song and save it as an mp3 file and play? Again, given you have this knowledge.
 

Kyle McKnight

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Well, you can open an mp3 file in wordpad....but I don't know how you'd go about converting it to an MP3 after saving it as a txt file.
 
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theoretically, given you have access to all text characters, you can creat a high quality song and save it as an mp3 file and play? Again, given you have this knowledge.
Just take the MP3 file and UUENCODE it. Then you'll have a text representation of the binary MP3. To play it again, UUDECODE it back to an MP3.
 

Mark Giles

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ok, i tried taking a 1:21 length mp3 song and opening it in word pad and its currently at 500+ pages and counting. Way too long. As a demostration for my class, I'm going to print out a 5 second mp3 on plan paper, rescan it, then convert it back to music. Then compare the beginning and end results.
 

John_Berger

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Okay, my curiosity is TOTALLY piqued! I have to ask...

WHY in the name of { insert deity here } would you want to do this sort of thing?
 
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ok, i tried taking a 1:21 length mp3 song and opening it in word pad and its currently at 500+ pages and counting. Way too long. As a demostration for my class, I'm going to print out a 5 second mp3 on plan paper, rescan it, then convert it back to music. Then compare the beginning and end results.
This of course will never work. Wordpad is a text editor and as such lacks the ability to display the high byte binary characters that appear in an MP3 file.

The ONLY way to do what you have described is to UUENCODE the MP3 file, then scan it in using OCR software, and UUDECODE the file back into a binary MP3. Any other method will fail to achieve what you are after.
 

Mark Giles

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Ok, gotcha...I was wondering how this would work because there are thousands of square characters when viewing in wordpad that I'm assuming are original unique characters wordpad just can't decipher. I will try UUencode this weekend. I'll take it to a local printing company with the ability to scan at higher speeds using the OCR tech. I'll make this work.
 

Ken Chan

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Wordpad is a text editor and as such lacks the ability to display the high byte binary characters that appear in an MP3 file.
Actually, most of those characters are probably displayable. However, unlike the standard ASCII characters from 0-127, the high ones vary by character set, so unless you know what that is, you can't really say for sure what the byte value of (for example) capital-A-diaeresis is.

The square boxes are for some of the ASCII control characters in the 0-31 range. Other ASCII control characters show up blank, so you can't distinguish between them, a plain old space (32) and the non-breaking space (usually 160).

uuencoding would work, although there are some interop issue which may not be relevant in this case. (Using the similar Base64 would guarantee cross-platform compatibility, and its lines are not limited to 46 characters.)

A couple of pages of text would probably end up being a tiny fraction of a second of music, unless you use a really small font....

//Ken
 

MikeAlletto

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I doubt it will even work if you cut out some and then try and play it. You run the risk of damaging the header or other pieces of data that tell the mp3 player information on how to handle the file.
 

Mark Giles

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Mike, I'm not cutting anything out. I'm starting with a 3-5 second music file. After that it's just converting, printing, and rescanning. My only worry is the accuracy of the OCR. One mistake could be like a needle in a haystack.
 

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