Metadata is wonderful. It helps us know what are songs are, what bitrate our videos are, and the titles of both video and audio, as well as other things which I cannot name right now.

But metadata can also be used against someone and something company.

I was converting the Racers 2 music to put on my mp3 player the other day (since they are just .wav files after all). And what I found in the metadata of every last one of them was very suprising.

I, and many other people, would assume that the music in LR2 are the original music files. And by original, I mean straight from the editing program into the game. But I've found out that they are not. How? From the metadata. (That was unnecessary. I've already said that, plus you should have picked that up by now. )

If you load any piece of music from LR2 into an audio editor (I use Audacity for every audio job I do) and export it to another file type, you will find three fields that are not normally in metadata: Year, Copyright, and Software. The menu.1 file was created on 5/30/01 @ 14:50:09 and the copyright is, of course, Attention to Detail Ltd. But the Software field is what caught me. The software used to create the music tracks is called WaveConvertPro.

A quick search of this progam led me here: http://www.sonicspot...convertpro.html The real site is still up, but there is no program page or download for it because of the type of program it is.

The site says that WaveConvertPro "is a sophisticated batch audio-file conversion and enhancement utility. The software can be used to convert between file formats and apply Waves Native plug-ins to achieve more accurate, delicate and natural sound. Apply EQ, reverb, compression, gating, bass enhancement and much more to get the best sounding results. WaveConvert Pro also allows you to dramatically improve the quality of audio files while making conversions." It goes on to say that the program supports AIFF, ASF, MP3, RA and WAV files.

Pretty nice program, don't you think? Audacity can do all that plus more, and for free. But if you keep reading, you will see that the program costs $300, $100 as an upgrade from WaveConvert. And the only requirements for it is that you run Windows 95, 98, or NT4.

Well, is that it? No. The program has a demo, but it "disables the "Convert" function and displays a nag dialog on start-up.".

What does all this mean? It means that the music from LR2 was converted to the final format using this $300 program that runs on Win95/98/NT4. Granted, ATD could have used this program for it's other games, but if they bought this program just for LR2 (and maybe DR. I keep hearing the music from it is the same format as LR2, but I can't get my hands on the raw files, mainly because I don't own the game, and I can't find download links anywhere), that was a waste of their money.

And that is how metadata can reveal a lot of info on one company.