mp3check history

In march 2003, I was tired of downloading broken MP3s and decided to search for a program which can check them. I found such a program, mp3_check, and it was good.

But the ever eminent quest for more features came to a high. I wanted to know how long all the songs in a given directory where in total. I made a quick hack. mp3_check now gave me the total length of all the files in a directory, and it was good.

While I was hacking mp3_check, I noticed that the code was not as structured as should be and some improvements could be made. I made some improvements to the code, and it was good.

But the lack of features, the slowness of the program and no posibility to extend the code kept hanging in my head. I had sleepless nights. I felt bad, I had nightmares and woke up screaming in the middle of the night. One night, I couldn't take it anymore and decided that a complete rewrite of this program was needed to get things in order.

So I started the next day, optimizing functions, cleaning up structs, testing, debugging and testing again. In the beginning, I made slow progress. Sometimes my program would stop working for no reason at all. One time, even the compiler segfaulted on my code. The code that I worked for, the code that I stayed up for, the code which would solve all the problems in the world, crashed the compiler. I almost gave up, but the thought of the greater good kept me motivated.

After hard work and great pain, I finally released mp3check version 0.01 to
you on the 30th of april, 2003. On the 31st of august I renamed mp3check to
mpck, because mp3check was a too common name.
