My hypothesis: it is stored magnetically (after all magnetic sinusoidals exist) and converted electrically once the mp3 is activated in time.
I keep reading by commenters that a purely mathematical space which operates on physical movement has no relevance to physical movement vis-a-vis spectral analysis and particularly in how this analyzer - again embedded with recursive electromagnetic charges (software code) - does not affect the original time-sample. I am aware now that MP3 encoding is capturing more information than the analyzer - by design - but how can electromagnetic resonances not be considered in the discussion to warrant continual downvotes?
(I'd like to remind readers that downvotes are not made available for all users, but only those who meet a certain criteria, i.e. those which reflect the general Hacker News community.)
Because everyone's been telling you the same thing in a multitude of different ways, but you refuse to get the point. Yes, the operation of the software we write can be affected by the physical realities of the hardware we use to execute them, but any time this causes the software to behave differently than it would in a purely hypothetical computer, this is considered an error and the results invalid. We even have hardware that automatically corrects for when rare events such as freakin' cosmic rays cause the value of a bit to flip (ECC memory).
The domain of software engineering is abstracted from physical reality. There's nothing useful to be gained from such discussions, because the whole job of hardware engineers is to enable us to operate at a higher level where we don't have to concern ourselves with the quantum electrodynamics necessary to make the transistors do their jobs.
What is a magnetic frequency? What does it mean to be "activated in time"? How does any of that relate to the question?
There is no need for a "hypothesis" here, mp3 is not a mysterious physical phenomenon, it is a well-defined file format, backed by well-understood signal processing.
I’m quite alarmed that I am being virtually thrown under the bus by those who do not have the knowledge on how they program electromagnetic waveforms.
I had been merely supposing the spectrogram software programming causes such spurious frequencies rather than actual filtering of what is still fundamentally electromagnetic action.
MP3s are stored in bitstrings. It doesn't matter what the medium these bitstrings are stored in.
The question being asked is a question about information, not about physics. So, your response is inapplicable.
The physical substrate which executes the algorithm is irrelevant to the discussion. Indeed, even the fact that the signal represents sound waves is irrelevant. We could build a computer that executes the same instructions on the same inputs mechanically, using gears and valves and whatnot, or perform the instructions manually on paper, and the algorithm would result in exactly the same output.
You are wording things very strangely (E.g. “principle of electromagnetic action”, “quantities of motion”). This greatly hinders communication. Are you able to say things in a more normal way?
My guess is you are asking why they believe that the substrate the algorithm is implemented in is irrelevant. This is by nature of what it means to implement an algorithm. The same algorithm implemented faithfully (by which I mean, implemented such that it runs correctly, i.e. as specified) will behave the same regardless of the substrate, because what it means for the algorithm to run correctly is independent of the substrate. If it behaved differently in a different substrate, in that it gave a different output, then it would not be performing/implementing the same algorithm, by virtue of what it means to be implementing an algorithm.
The algorithm being considered must be considered in an applied scientific paradigm. One is not simply examining a mathematical operation, but one which is being examined to cause natural movement - unless you believe an algorithmic process is occurring with nothing correspondent to nature? To consider it irrelevant to the question of the fidelity differences in a spectrogram analog conversion and an MP3 - which I must remind reader entails the electrical signal output to something humanely resourceful, e.g. listening in headphones - is lacking in critical insight. This is after all the original question, and not an issue of algorithmic differences, correct?