Top AI Product

PianoDisc sells self-playing piano systems, and its songs ship as rigged MP3s: the left channel carries backing audio, the right channel hides MIDI data encoded as a 2004.5 Hz square wave. Want custom songs on your own piano? Not supported.

HN user jmpman fed the files to Claude Fable. The model identified the encoding, cross-checked extracted MIDI against open-source Mutopia scores, and spotted the real trap: PianoDisc deliberately injects decoy notes, so naively extracted MIDI comes out unplayable. Fable filtered them out, then wrote a complete working encoder and decoder — turning a locked-down piano into one that plays anything.

Why the thread blew up

jmpman asked one question: “Can I publish this?” That lit up a 160-point, 98-comment DMCA fight — do dummy notes count as an “effective technical measure,” or does Section 1201(f) interoperability protection apply? Top advice: publish anonymously, never email the company first.

The pattern worth watching

This is the second hit in the “Claude cracks proprietary hardware protocols” genre, after the HP printer driver saga. Work that once took hobbyists months with an oscilloscope now takes one chat session. Every vendor lock-in built on obscurity should be nervous.

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