I've been sorting through my music in my computer. If I either view the folder in "Details" mode and make sure one of the active columns is "Comments", or open a file's "Properties" and go to the "Details" tab and look down at the "Comments" field, I sometimes see something like this:
000001FF 000001E5 0000190F 00001AF2 0001BF8D 00038172 000053D1 00005626 0001BF8D 0001C9F5
They're hexadecimal (base 16) numbers, apparently one unique set of them per song. This only applies to songs I got from CDs (and haven't edited), and it might only apply to CDs from some record labels and not others. (I checked for two of my albums with them, and they're from two different companies.) Amazon puts something like "Amazon music file #12345" in the same metadata field instead. So it looks like some or all record labels agreed to maintain a database of all of the songs they ever put on CD, identified by these numbers in a consistent format.
What was their reason for doing this? Were computers ever originally intended to actually do anything with these numbers? (I have reason to believe that at least one system I use used them to find album cover art, but that kind of thing wasn't being done yet when the earliest CDs with these numbers in them were made, and it might have been doable just as easily with things like the song title, group name, album title, year, and track length, which are also in the metadata in their own separate fields. I also thought it might be something about the old DRM rules that said you could only copy a song a few times before it would render itself unusable, but, again, some of these albums date back to before that.)
000001FF 000001E5 0000190F 00001AF2 0001BF8D 00038172 000053D1 00005626 0001BF8D 0001C9F5
They're hexadecimal (base 16) numbers, apparently one unique set of them per song. This only applies to songs I got from CDs (and haven't edited), and it might only apply to CDs from some record labels and not others. (I checked for two of my albums with them, and they're from two different companies.) Amazon puts something like "Amazon music file #12345" in the same metadata field instead. So it looks like some or all record labels agreed to maintain a database of all of the songs they ever put on CD, identified by these numbers in a consistent format.
What was their reason for doing this? Were computers ever originally intended to actually do anything with these numbers? (I have reason to believe that at least one system I use used them to find album cover art, but that kind of thing wasn't being done yet when the earliest CDs with these numbers in them were made, and it might have been doable just as easily with things like the song title, group name, album title, year, and track length, which are also in the metadata in their own separate fields. I also thought it might be something about the old DRM rules that said you could only copy a song a few times before it would render itself unusable, but, again, some of these albums date back to before that.)
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3dPGRwF
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