what the **** do you think you're doing?

[sisyphusshrugged]

This metafilter item about Madonna's pranked mp3 file and the interesting and creative things people are doing with it (downloads!) is also, in comments, a sterling display of whimsical geekery (I adore geeks) as well as an interesting debate on piracy and distribution models:

...

Can she be charged with promoting obscenity to underaged Kazaa users?
posted by HTuttle at 11:56 PM PST on April 23


madonna is weird.
posted by kv at 11:58 PM PST on April 23


What kind of compression is mp3 if a track comprised mostly of silence is of a convincing size?
posted by ODiV at 12:10 AM PST on April 24


ODiv, Normal, non-VBR mp3 compression will compress to a set bitrate...if it's a 128kbps mp3, you'll just get very "good" quality silence. Variable Bitrate (VBR) compression, on the other hand, reduces the bitrate in sections of the audio that don't have much data anyway - silence, low-pitch sounds, mono sounds.
posted by Jimbob at 12:23 AM PST on April 24


yeah, one of the tricky things about file compression is that you are, to some extent, trying to second-guess the input you're recieving. If you're into math, you might check out Lovasz' notes on computational complexity. [postscript file; try ghostview] The chapter of particular importance is chapter 7 on information complexity, though the whole of the text is fairly interconnected... That's rather more abstract than the stuff that goes into the mp3 encoding algorithms, though, which I've little knowledge of. Other than that it sounds like ass below 160kbps. *grin*
posted by kaibutsu at 12:37 AM PST on April 24


F*ck Madonna.
posted by drstrangelove at 12:53 AM PST on April 24...