Believe it or not, straight to jail
Open a text file in media player? Also straight to jail
It’ll likely crash the editor, but if it doesn’t then you get cool Matrix code. That’s actually how we used to make Matrix backgrounds back in the day, open an image in a text editor, copy the code, transform it to vertical, change it to green, eureka!
But what is all that crap? Is that the literal machine code or something? Like what is it and in the eff does it actually goid-enough approximate its subject content?
Every file is made up of zeroes and ones, what’s different between the formats is how those zeroes and ones are interpreted. When you open a mp4 in a text editor what you see is the result of the text editor interpreting the data as if it were text. Since the data doesn’t actually represent text, the result is meaningless garbage.
A word processor like MS Word or LibreOffice Writer will probably refuse to open it, giving some error such as “unsupported file type.”
Depending on how much of a nerd you are, the plaintext editor your OS comes with may either also refuse to open it, or open it as if it were plaintext and you might see a few jumbles of letters and punctuation, or weird symbols if it interprets it as unicode. According to Vim, my mp3 copy of Glycerine by Bush is mostly @ symbols. I noticed that my Bash shell didn’t want to autocomplete “Vim glycerine.mp3” but when typed manually it did it with minimal fuss.
If you open it in a hex editor, you might be surprised to see the first few lines are readable, they likely contain metadata that media player software like VLC can understand, like the track name, artist, year of release and such. Scroll down further and you’ll start to see more gibberish where it’s trying to interpret the individual bytes that make up the audio as ASCII characters. Funnily enough hexedit gave me a different looking bunch of gibberish than Vim did.
I am assuming it inputs the byte stream of the file to the text parser and only glibberish comes out
Try it and see. It won’t hurt anything.
The app will find the file incomprehensible and will tell you that the file is corrupted or in a format the app can’t understand.
An app that works with raw next (Windows’ Editor or notepad++ or any IDE) will try to parse the binary data as text and fail miserably, showing you lots of undecodable-unicode characters.
Example:
%.š /BûT¹Ò;lŠ^œ{åúvž’Û X“—دa%“9HúU”¿ú¦¥N̉ČԿ†«dd’º•©“ÜÈê*è9$mÕ lfN‹„‘ª$bÿû°@§ gÂqâ`tŒøn<cm-‰ Ljmð3¡|ñ°k§û–ÿîo<©ªxgTZ¯óT†"x¦1Q®ÔÚóI# 3édgþ™>´dʶÌþB…o™ÜË7bMûö”]«ê|= ®©w„Ïɳ²NdÅh˜Ñ#´¦ïÕ®ºAd`‹®«R²•]‡ÐÏE päX 0PÛnE”Ø΋şçÒñD]îbwNðèB$¤“nnzráiqÖ›XåÄvØÉË \ø\¦P¼¶Xæ‰Â6…”ææ†?äÖåœ:m|?B3C+dW»f†`Ê$Lˆmìóz¯xK>‘)ƒÜÉTÝ ¨@‘ Š£Ð:¨õ¹|!„D QC#£ö ªJ¼×u›³ÕÒ©˜gV"!V«; áäi³EJ…3;zã[±0&ËsÖ_Ë·³‡ ó8MaTô”ÖBïKßïùl4zHJE’N¢ìo™iÒg$½›—U.ºtÉW›SXGÓÐŒ§N¢–L¨YþïZOPNìÌÙŸN ŽŠióyÄ,QÍfÙ¬
But is sound reproducible this way?
Imagine you have a book that’s written in Korean. If you gave it to me and asked me to read it out loud, I wouldn’t be able to make sense out of it. If you gave it to a Korean person, however, they could read it perfectly fine.
The book itself hasn’t changed — just the person reading the book. And that person has a different set of skills (or instructions, if you will).
