Richard Farrar’s Blog

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Most of us make fundamental decisions in life based on trying to achieve a single fixed goal, but if you’re prepared to look a little further unexpected benefits can often be found.

Any decision or choice you make in life is likely to have direct and indirect consequences. In making your decision your are going to weigh up the pros and and cons of the obvious and predictable consequences. However, there will always be something you hadn’t thought of, that with a little work or change of attitude, may be turned to your benefit.

These secondary or tangential benefits are not necessarily be monetary and may present themselves in various guises that aren’t immediately obvious. Some you will need to seek out, others are already there, but perhaps you just didn’t see them as such.

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While the terms mono and stereo are probably familiar to most people, the term joint stereo is certainly much less common. So when is stereo not stereo?

Most of the music that you listen to today is likely to have been recorded and designed for playback on a stereo system, either through a pair of headphones or a pair of speakers. Even very cheap portable systems nowadays are just as likely to include two speakers for stereo playback as they are a single one.

So if the days of mono systems are all but over, what’s this joint stereo nonsense all about? Is this a retrograde step or something altogether more cunning?

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The first time you meet someone new one of their opening questions is likely to be “What do you do?” The answer to which is only ever expected to be singular.

Why, in such a supposedly enlightened and forward thinking society, is it assumed that we can only do or excel at a single thing? Isn’t this limiting our natural potential by conditioning everybody to think they can only be good at one thing?

Based on your answer to the above question, you are likely to be stereotyped and pigeon holed by your newly met acquaintance, and will probably have to work very hard to convince them otherwise of your multifaceted personality.

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Album art can be embedded into MP3 files fairly easily using ID3 tags. However, before you start filling up all of your MP3 files with works of art, there are a few things that you should stop to consider first.

While MP3 files were not originally intended to store additional metadata within them, the release of the ID3 tag protocol in 1996 suddenly made this a possibility. However, it wasn’t until version 2 of the protocol became available that MP3 files could actually contain embedded album art.

So, before you start cutting and pasting huge graphics and adding them into your collection of MP3 tracks, what do you need to consider to avert potential disaster?

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MP3 files usually contain track data embedded within the file in addition to the audio data. This additional data is contained in ID3 tags and typically include the track’s title, artist and album details. However, these tags are much more versatile and can also contain a lot of extra information about the file in question.

A plain MP3 file just contains audio data with no further information about the artist or type of audio contained within it. To be able to include such additional data in an MP3, tag data is usually added to either the beginning or end of the audio file in an ID3 format.

While the original ID3 specification was quite limited with regards to the information that it could store about a file, later versions allow for great flexibility in the type and amount of data that can be stored.

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