Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
The micro-SD flash memory chip that came with my new smartphone has some interesting issues with data integrity. I mostly use it to store sound files in the mp3 format, both pop songs of a few MB each and podcasts taking up tens of megabytes. And while listening to podcasts, in the middle of them, I have repeatedly come across three interesting and disturbing errors. The flash memory makes psychedelic remixes of my sound files!
- As I listen to one mp3 file, I suddenly hear several seconds from another file before the original recording resumes.
- As I listen to one mp3 file, I suddenly hear several seconds from a deleted file before the original recording resumes.
- As I listen to an mp3 file, the audio suddenly becomes pitched down to a barely comprehensible guttural grunt for tens of seconds.
These changes to the original files are permanent and always recur in the same way. With audio files, it's mainly just a nuisance. But there was GPS map data delivered on that chip too. I don't think it would be very useful after spontaneous random remix with snippets of mp3 audio.
Comments
The first two sound like an addressing problem but the third sounds more like a problem with the audio codec (unless the data read access is totally farked up). The simple test would be to swap memory modules.
Posted by: JimFiore | June 9, 2008 6:05 PM