Checksum added to MP3

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

How do I add a checksum automatically to my MP3 file using Audacity. I am using windows 10 and Audacity version 2.1.1

Regards,
Dion

2

What’s the goal?
Koz

3

Hi,

I do podcasts, and need to be sure that what I record on my pc will be what gets uploaded to the server. I do a couple of other checks for integrity against the feed files and thought that a checksum might be good way of ensuring that the integrity of the mp3’s are maintained without me manually checking them again once uploaded.

Cheers.

4

Audacity records in lossless PCM, so you will have to create the checksum after MP3 export from Audacity. There are lots of standalone utilities to do this and some utilities like hex editors include checksum tools.


Gale

5

If your Windows doesn’t have an MD5 checksum function built-in , you can get one from Microsoft ,
or [better] one from third party which batch-processes all files in a folder, e.g.

6

Thanks folks.

7

I’m not sure how practical this is because if you embed the checksum in the file (i.e. saving it in a comment field) then you’ve written to the file, changing the checksum, making the checksum you’ve just embedded invalid.

So, I think you’d have to store the checksum in a separate database. Or, write a program that calculates the checksum of the MP3 data while ignoring any other information in the file.

Also, if you change/correct an ID3 tag, you’ll change the checksum.

I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think FLAC automatically embeds the checksum of the audio data only so you can change tags/metadata (which would change the checksum of the entire file) without screwing-up the checksum for the audio data.

8

Yes, you’re correct, Doug, and that “Audio MD5” is checked by flac when testing or decoding.

But not many players will show you the Audio MD5. Foobar2000 is one that does.


Gale