How do I hide a picture of a cat in a music file?

September 13, 2013 3:20 PM

Thanks to this comment on the blue I've learned that hiding images in audio files is a thing. How do I make my own?

The spectrograph software seems mostly one direction. It will show you what's there, but how do I feed an image into something and say "turn this into sound?"

I have Adobe Audition which lets me do very crude pictures by selecting with a lasso but the cat photo in the Venetian Snares song is clearly from a photograph.

posted by RobotHero to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Best answer: The post you linked to says what software one can use: Coagula on a PC, MetaSynth on a Mac (which is what Aphex Twin uses; expensive though). This guy rolled his own.
posted by supercres at 3:31 PM on September 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Oh, Lifehacker covered the process-- they used Coagula and Sonic Visualizer.
posted by supercres at 3:39 PM on September 13, 2013

Best answer: Spectrobits - free VST.
posted by mintcake! at 3:44 PM on September 13, 2013

Best answer: Here's another.

Apparently Audacity can do it but I haven't figured out how yet.
posted by supercres at 3:49 PM on September 13, 2013

Best answer: I wrote a semi-coherent tutorial on how to do this in 2004:

http://www.kempa.com/2004/05/03/more-musical-steganography/

I'd bet 90% of those links are dead now. I know: self link, poor mefi form, etc. This is the first time I've checked in on the green in months and this is the top post. Do people still say "in the green?"
posted by adamkempa at 5:54 PM on September 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Image to Spectrogram is yet another, but it's very slow and the results aren't ideal.
posted by scruss at 5:56 PM on September 13, 2013

> self link, poor mefi form, etc.

Thanks for that link, adamkempa. Self-linking inside comment threads is Not Wrong, or so say I.
posted by jfuller at 7:53 AM on September 14, 2013

I’ve never really thought of that as "hiding" images in audio files, it’s just what the visualization of the sound looks like something. Hiding would be like steganography.

Metasynth is crazy expensive for that, but it does a lot more.
Photosounder is much more affordable for this use.
posted by bongo_x at 10:38 AM on September 15, 2013

Response by poster: So far I've been playing with the Photosounder demo. I don't actually manipulate the image in there, (I don't care for the drawing tools so I paint in Photoshop) but it's the only one I looked at that will go both ways (sound to image and back again) with one tool.
posted by RobotHero at 11:31 PM on September 30, 2013