I’ve noticed some files I opened in a text editor have all kinds of crazy unrenderable chars

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    There’s two things at play here.

    MP3 (or WAV, OGG, FLAC etc.) provide a way to encode polyphony and stereo and such into a sequence of bytes.

    And then separately, there’s Unicode (or ASCII) for encoding letters into bytes. These are just big tables which say e.g.:

    • 01000001 = uppercase ‘A’
    • 01000010 = uppercase ‘B’
    • 01100001 = lowercase ‘A’

    So, what your text editor does, is that it looks at the sequence of bytes that MP3 encoded and then it just looks into its table and somewhat erronously interprets it as individual letters.