MP3-GIF: Hide Music Inside A Picture

In this instructable i will teach you how to hide an mp3 music file inside a gif image by hand.

all credit for this idea goes to thomas scott

Step 1 Ingredients

What you will need:
A GIF image

An MP3 music file (preferably not too long)

A computer (hopefully you figured this one out on your own :P )

Comments

[lanky.ninja]

The little devil doesn't work, i think instructables convrts all pictures when it gets uploaded therefore loosing your compressed folder.

[dyankee50]

First comment is that your link to Tom Scott's page is broken and I didn't see anything on his site about this.
Second is that I've experimented with this for half dozen tries and all I get  is a Gif that displays the little devil picture in my player. (Quicktime, MediaPlayer Classic and Windows Media Player 11 (on XP SP3). The file is properly concatenated/combined (according to length) and  MPC  counts time as if it were playing it but no sound; QT and WMP display the GIF but don't do anything else.
If I rename the combined file extension as MP3 they play it ok without the picture.

[Amadeos]

Now, using your idea, instead typing in: "copy Picture.gif /b + Music.Mp3 /b Combined.gif" Use "copy Picture.gif /b + Music.Mp3 /b Combined.mp3" It works better for me, (it might be because of my Windows version (98) but thats what works best!)

[RedFlash]

What? The whole point of this instructable was to "conceal" the mp3

[In0xI]

Only works with winamp. Wmediaplayer, realplayer, quickplayer - not workin but showing the image.

[RedFlash]

Works with vlc media player

[emuman4evr]

I discovered the same thing.

[RedFlash]

Can this method be reversed? Because I don't want to have to go open with...

[stuuf]

Can you also do Vorbis-PNG or FLAC-JPEG2000 or anything that doesn't use decades-old obsolete compression standards?

[ELF]

Hey, was just wondering... Isn't this also used for viruses and the alike? Or could be... ??

[schimmi]

i just tried it with an exe file i wrote and it works fine.

[pyromanizak]

exactly, but they usually combine an exe (virus) with the picture or music file.

[emuman4evr]

The only thing I could play the combined file with was Winamp, Windows media played failed like it usually does...

[schetleft]

you can hide just about anything inside the jpeg. you just need something to extract the files. I'll probably make an instructable on my way

[Ingerson]

This is often used to host content on forums that only allow image files to be uploaded. You can add mp3s and archives such as zip/rar to jpg/gif files. Usually what people do is when saving the file from the web to local PC is rename with the correct suffix (such as mergedfile.mp3 or mergedfile.rar) and it just opens in the correct program.

[illegalc0de]

you can also hid rar files in the gif as well. i did this on windows so linux and mac users i think you can work out what im doing. use winrar to compress a file(s) then run the command as copy pic.gif /b %2B ziped.rar /b out.gif then double clicking on the file (out.gif) will open up in a picture viewer whilst opening it up in winrar will show you the file(s) and the beauty of this is that i cant see any data loss. the only problems are 1 if you don't put a password on the rar file then its very insecure and 2 people can see that a gif has something hidden inside it cause of the file size of the gif. but great though. thanks.

[TheDarkNinja]

Yeah, mine not working either. Tried a few variations of the command. I can get the image to show up in media player, and it knows the title of the song, but there is no sound and stops playing after a few seconds. Any ideas?

[spedoinkle]

yeah, go to thoma's scott's page, he has a web baed version you can try out.

[VIRON]

This works on hardware mp3 players because the decoder chip is silent while it is reading non-mp3 data, normally such as the headers. This is useful because gifs are small (can be,should be), and don't waste much memory. You could make different icons for different kinds of music. If it's your band's music, use your cover art.

[spedoinkle]

cd\ in windows brings you to the root directory cd / does the same thing in linux

[spedoinkle]

open a text document using notepad. type cmd inside the note. save note as .bat double click on your new .bat

[spedoinkle]

go to the start bar and click run, then type cmd or command

[neocastillo]

Hmmm seems interesting but you file didn't play in windows media player, quicktime, or VLC.

[spedoinkle]

well, screw my try at it then, make your own!!!

[lemonie]

Last time I was using a Mac, it stubbornly persisted in maintaining that doccuments created by e.g. MS Word were MS Word doccuments & refused to open them with anything else. Will this / does this work on a Mac?

L

[LasVegas]

...a Mac, it stubbornly persisted in maintaining that doccuments created by e.g. MS Word were MS Word doccuments & refused to open them with anything else

Funny how that works ain't it? :) You can easily change the default app for any suffixed document on a Mac by useing the Open With option in the Get Info window. Once changing the default program for that specific document, there will be a button to "Change All" for all others of that suffix.

Now there's also an older system of file identification which is a carryover of the old Classic OS that identifies the document through a pair of 4 digit codes (fileCreator & fileType). While they still could be present, they should no longer effect much in OS X.

If this doesn't prove to be the case on your Mac, use Disk Utility and "Repair Permissions" on your drive.

Will this / does this work on a Mac?

Apparently not. I've tried it multiple ways. It didn't. It's very easy to embed graphics into an MP3 using Apple's own utilities (including Garage Band), so I don't really see this as a problem.

[LasVegas]

To download the original uploaded GIF, use this link, it should work as spedoinkle claims. If not, try changing the sufix to 'mp3' before opening with the music player.

On a Macintosh, the terminal window is opened by running the Terminal application in the Utilities folder.

[neocastillo]

Changing the suffix didn't seem to help either.

[LasVegas]

You're right, it doesn't. While QT did see that an audio portion should be present, it played silence.

[tyeo098]

Ok...now how do you separate them?

[scotty3785]

Separating would be more tricky! Each separate file has a header and a footer so that it knows what it is basically. Concatenating the two files would keep the headers and footers so it should be possible to separate the files. It would probably require a piece of code to be written in C perhaps to find the end of one file and the start of the next and to split them up. Once you know what the headers and footers look like it would be a trivial task.

[royalestel]

Well, wouldn't play in windows media player, but I suppose you mean an mp3 device. Nifty idea. Hope it works on my little squirt.

[jeffreyf]

This is pretty awesome. I didn't know the two formats could be combined without corrupting either one. It's a great steganography trick.

[Proteus]

Most file formats have some kind checksum for the whole file and might not work with this method but Gifs will :-)

Kudos to you spedoinkle =D