Artist Cory Arcangel and experimental music producer Oneohtrix Point Never recently released a mysterious audio file and no one is sure exactly what it sounds like. It was, as of earlier today, technically and literally unlistenable. We considered that perhaps we weren’t meant to actually hear it, that this was an intentional artistic gesture commentating on just how fleeting technology has become, requiring an ancient dust-covered computer that’s completely outfitted with nothing but the latest software… from the 2006.
But Tiny Mixtapes tried. It didn’t work. We tried. It worked!
Here’s the audio file, extracted for your listening pleasure.
It took some time though. Here’s a play-by-play… The file is accompanied by the following text:
Advanced Television Systems Committee A/52 digital audio coding algorithm for use in satellite or terrestrial audio broadcasting, delivery of audio over metallic or optical cables, or storage of audio on magnetic, optical, semiconductor, or other storage media as contained in a RealNetworks RealAudio (dnet) wrapper.
As far as we know, this file, or more specifically this audio codec is no longer supported by RealPlayer. After endlessly searching RealPlayer support forums for about forty-five minutes, we realized just how elusive this audio codec is.
After downloading the “Joyvtl Jvbuayf” file from Oneohtrix Point Never’s website, we installed the latest version of RealPlayer, which is so antiquated that it actually offers 28.8K as an available connection speed for configuration.
After installing RealPlayer, we tried opening the file only to realize that it requires “RA 3.0” an audio codec that is no longer supported by the player.
Now what? ANIMAL ally Peter Yeh came to our rescue once again and managed to get this working with a VLC media player 2.0.7 Twoflower, “I’m running a conversion now to a video format to see if I can pull video data, but I doubt it. It’s probably just music.” It was. Decode it yourself.
