Because I was trying to distract myself from stuff I looked at some files in a hex editor, and really old DRM AAC / M4P files from iTunes (still have a few arou

Because I was trying to distract myself from stuff I looked at some files in a hex editor, and really old DRM AAC / M4P files from iTunes (still have a few around...) don't seem to have the same huge "free" padding block at the start of them (you can still see smaller "free" chunks, so they don't seem to be hidden by the encryption). Which is weird. DRM iTunes Store files were 128kbs, whilst non-DRM ones are 256kbs, as beyond removing DRM one of the selling points of what was called iTunes Plus at the time was better quality. So it's possibly back in circa 2009 someone made a fuckup with the encoding settings and no-one has noticed since. Or its some extremely weird conspiracy to sell larger iPods. Or perhaps they wanted to make the filesizes just a bit bigger so that iTunes Plus files felt like quality, like the way expensive products have metal weights added just to make them feel heavier and more solid.[1] [1] For avoidance of doubt, this last suggestion may be what is known as "humour".