The Secret Anti-MP3 Trick In “Independent Women” and “You Sang To Me”

2008.10.10   prev     next

OK — I can’t prove this. It’s just a theory based on my own experiences. But here goes:

Between the death of the vinyl, 45rpm single, and the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there was a period when the only way to get hold of a single song, by an artist you considered to be a one-hit-wonder, for anything less than about US$15, was to get it for free as an MP3. First it was face-to-face file swapping, but soon the original Napster music-swapper app came online and turned the internet into a carnival of free music, in which I sometimes indulged. (For the record, most of my music came from my or my wife’s CDs.)

A lot of not-so-perfect MP3 encoders abounded at that time, plus people who didn’t know how to properly use a good encoder, so many of the resultant MP3 files had annoying compression artifacts that nobody would put up with for ten seconds today. But back then you generally had to. I would flag MP3 files with my own special tags depending on how bad the artifacts were, and keep trying to re-obtain the worst offenders until I got a clean-sounding copy.

A few songs seemed to have no clean copies. It was frustrating how many times you could acquire the same song, and still hear that annoying, very-high-pitched “clinking nails” artifact in the background. Didn’t anybody have a clean copy of this song? Over time, two songs in particular resisted all my attempts to find a clean encoding: Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women” and Marc Anthony’s “You Sang To Me.” I eventually gave up on trying to get them, and figured that one day I would borrow someone’s CD and rip my own clean copy. But that never happened. iTunes Music Store came along, my first iPod’s hard drive died and, thanks to manual-sync mode, my collection of free music died with it. The CD collection was buried in a box in the basement. I lost interest in maintaining all my favorite songs, figuring I could eventually rebuild my collection with legitimate iTunes purchases. And anyway, my current music player is a first-generation, 8-gig iPhone that doesn’t quite have enough room to comfortably accommodate all that music.

So it wasn’t until just recently that it occurred to me — hey, I can get those two stubborn songs from the iTunes Store, and they’ll finally be clean copies! I’ll be listening to them cleanly in a CD-quality format for the first time ever. So I spent the two bucks and now own my first legit copies of those songs.

And guess what? To my stunned amazement, I found that they still have that wierd, bad-MP3 sound in the background! And then it hit me: Both of these songs came out during the heyday of MP3 file swapping — what if the recording engineers purposely infused them with a small amount of MP3 artifact, so no one would ever have a “clean” copy? Then, in frustration, dedicated collectors everywhere would go buy the songs on CD just to complete their collection, and discover too late (no returns on CDs by that date!) that they had a clean copy all along.

Worked on me.

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