Music Production

Note that I'm not an mp4 expert so this is general advice. You will have text based formats, these can generally be opened in a text editor such as notepad++, you will sometimes have combo formats like docx that are zip files with text readable contents, and then you may have what are called binary blobs.

Binary blob formats are not encoded in a readable format. To get a feel for how these are encoded you would need to study the format standard and/or use a program to represent the encoding in a way intelligible for you. This is actually a big issue for records management and if you are curious to learn more then look into LOTAR and NARA approved formats.

What you’ll find is most modern files for video, like .mp4, are what are called container files. They have to provide a video and audio stream as well as sometimes an embedded subtitle stream. At the end of the day, it’s a folder.

Then those streams are often compressed, which aren’t readable at a file level. They have to be decompressed first before having any sensible output.

It helps to understand how a byte stream is taken from the binary values to a usually 16-bit range at usually 44,100 times per second and you’ll quickly realize that you’d be hard-pressed to read the raw bits and be able to imagine the sound in your head. There’s far too much to break down here, but there’s whole college courses focused on just this concept.

Something that probably resembles a lot more of what you’re expecting is MIDI. That doesn’t contain audio itself, as such, but instead a series of instructions for the computer to play notes with instructions, like pitch, octave, velocity, length, and many custom channels for anything you could think of.

And that’s all just audio. Video is a dark art that I’ve yet to approach. The things we’ve managed to make happen with the tiny files we use are just wild when you get into the science of it.

Try to open the file with https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

The "pattern data" is what you want (look at the screenshots).

if you want to see only the music and you have an mp4, which is usually a video, you have to extract the audio data first. you can do this with mplayer or mencoder, for example.

Then, if you have the audio extracted, you can take a look at that, but it's usually too complicated to be read by humans like that. I suggest, you use something like mhWavedit that decodes the sound wave values and displays them in a neat abstract graph for editing.