I swear, this thing's haunted or owned by the devil or something and I'm freaked. This is
very long but fuck you, I've been pulling my hair out for over seven hours now.
I dl'ed this song sometime last year and have come to like it. It's one of Kylie Minogue's many b-sides and it's a catchy little thing. Well, I go to burn it on a disc and realize that my disc is fucked up. The song ends and I get this huge window of silence. No prob, I'll just do it over again and it'll be fixed.
I go back into WMP and realize the file itself appears to be corrupt. It says it's 5:30 long, but it's actually longer than that time and for whatever reason remains in play for a few seconds. Through trial and error I discover that for whatever odd fucking reason, the 5:30+ mp3 reduces itself to the 4:16 version of "Cherry Bomb" and replaces the remaining time with silence. All right, that's odd. But fine, I'll just find a new copy.
This is far easier said than done. "Cherry Bomb" at a longer play length than 4:16 is not a common animal. I finally find what I believe to be it @
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4QXB34R1 as part of Boombox (2008). [Which I already had on my computer, so I'm pretty sure.]
I dl and uncompress, etc. I play the track I want and it clocks in at 6:00. Fucking A. Me happy. So I attempt to add it to my media library with no success. I do that "Add to Library" thingy like twice and it's as if the file doesn't even exist. I figure, ok, so the old one's still there and even though the paths are different, I should get rid of it anyway. I do. It finally accepts the new one, however, when I play it it plays like the fucking old one. Teh fuck?
Oh, duh, I didn't clean the old one out of the Recycle Bin. I do so. I restart the comp. No dice. Plays like the old one. Furthermore, it used to read 6:00 and now reads 5:30. It'll sometimes play longer than 5:30 or shorter at around 4:10 - 4:20 or even stop neatly at 5:30, but it always reads the same length. When I say "stop neatly", I mean it. It almost NEVER ends abruptly like a song being cut off. Each "version" ends like it's supposed to end. There's not instance of "oh, I heard it cut off" or whatever. It's like there's three true versions of this fucking song and they all play randomly off of one file no matter what.
So by this time I'm getting pissed. I delete the old one out and attempt to replace it by re-extracting it from the rar file but it does no good. I rename the file after I extract it (erasing all of the artist/album/genre/etc data off of the damn thing) and add it to my library. I rename the file in the rar and then pull it back out. But it's no good. It never reads 6:00 ever again and it stops basically at the times I mentioned. I save the rar to my USB drive, extract the contents from Merla's comp, and it comes out like the same corrupt 5:30 version I had at the very beginning. (Note: I have never had any versions of this song on Merla's laptop.)
I go back to my laptop and I delete both rar files of Boombox (2008). [I had another one there but its version of "Cherry Bomb" never played right to begin with.] I delete all versions of Cherry Bomb except for three I already had on there before I found the right one: original Cherry Bomb, Matt's Extended Remix, and DJ Alexma's Remix. I decide to add a bunch of random non-music files and then delete them in hopes of overwriting the old Cherry Bomb shit and then I re-empty the bin for the millionth time, do a disc clean-up, and fucking defrag. Meanwhile, I go to my desktop and relocate the megaupload file online. I redownload the fucker and extract the files and still come face to face with a corrupt version: it reads 5:30. WTH, this thing read 6:00 before. There have never been any versions of Cherry Bomb on my desktop either. WAI.
I delete that, get my USB, get that rar and re-extract. No dice. I download about eight or so different files of Cherry Bomb from different locations. None of them are 6:00 but one is 5:30. I keep it and put it on my USB drive. Meanwhile, I've gone to YouTube and find three instances of people posting 6:00 versions on that site. So I figure, okay, I'm not imagining this shit. My computer's not just making shit up or looping a file and tricking me or some odd crap. It appears a version around 6:00 exists:
Well, I didn't want to record from YouTube because I originally wanted a better quality version, but fuck it. So as I play the YouTube clips again, I realize all of them stop at around 4:00 now and give me two minutes of fucking sound. HOW. THE. FUCK. It's like something discerned my attempt to steal it off of YouTube and stopped me. I later tried this on Merla's laptop and it's the same fucking thing. I can't record the song from YouTube.
[As of writing this, I realize I tried neither time on my desktop or Merla's laptop using IE instead of Firefox, so I'm doing that and getting a notice to update flash. However, not having flash updated doesn't explain how the song magically shortens itself to the 4:30 version on three postings of it on fucking YouTube. When I try to jump ahead, I get a corrupt bit of sound but otherwise it's the shortest version of the song. EDIT: Nope, still plays short.]
I go back to my laptop, taking the 5:30 version from my desktop with me. Fuck it, says I, I'll just use the 5:30 version. Lo and behold, the perfectly sound 5:30 that's on my desktop plays like the corrupt one on my laptop. Merla's laptop seems to play the file fine. OKay, I'll use Merla's comp. So I take all of the other mp3s I was gonna burn with it and move them to Merla's comp, rearrange them the way I had them on my laptop. Well, when I play Cherry Bomb again, now it's corrupt and plays the short version one time and the long one another time! So that solution's no good either.
I'd record the playback off of my laptop, the one place where I can trick it to play long, but I can't record sounds off of my laptop (other than speaking into a mic, I guess).
But what the hell, man? How come everytime I seem to have a solution, the damn thing fucks up! On three computers, two different versions of windows, from different sources (rar, single mp3's from mediafire), even on youtube?
What's worse, I decided to use one of the remixes instead because at least it played right. Well, I skipped ahead to the end to make certain and it eventually began fucking up too and playing Cherry Bomb even past it's play time! It's only a 5:14 file, but it didn't stop and started playing past its end time! THAT really weirded me out. That's just some random dude's own remix version. Something longer shouldn't even exist!
