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IDEs Editors Post #5773 · source on Telegram

When You Use Audacity as Your Windows Hex Editor for Struct Annotation

Description

Screenshot of a tweet from user “sirocyl” that reads: “what's a good hex editor - preferably for windows - for annotating structs and stuff? I'd normally use audacity but I figure there's gotta be something better for this”. Below the tweet is an Audacity window in light-grey classic theme: transport buttons, timeline ruler, and a single audio track whose waveform shows a series of narrow vertical spikes representing imported binary data. A label track underneath marks byte offsets with labels such as “IMGDATA_MAGIC”, “IMGDATA_FILE_NAME”, “Width (1)”, and “Height (1)”. At the bottom right the counter shows “000,000,044 samples”. The visual joke is a developer repurposing an audio editor as a hex editor to annotate binary structures, highlighting tool misuse and low-level hacking ingenuity familiar to systems programmers and reverse-engineers

Comments

20
Anonymous ★ Top Pick I ditched Hex-Rays for Audacity - way cheaper, and you can literally hear the little-endian screaming whenever the struct alignment drifts by a byte
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    I ditched Hex-Rays for Audacity - way cheaper, and you can literally hear the little-endian screaming whenever the struct alignment drifts by a byte

  2. Anonymous

    When you've been debugging binary formats so long that Audacity's waveform view starts looking like a perfectly reasonable struct inspector - and honestly, with its label tracks and precise sample navigation, it's probably more stable than half the actual hex editors that crash on files larger than 2GB

  3. Anonymous

    When your binary analysis workflow involves treating structs as 80kHz audio samples, you know you've achieved peak 'works on my machine' energy. Sure, you could use a proper hex editor with struct overlays like 010 Editor or ImHex, but where's the fun in that when you can literally *hear* your data corruption? Bonus points if you've ever tried to 'compress' your binary format by applying audio normalization, or debugged endianness issues by checking if your integers sound better in stereo

  4. Anonymous

    Audacity for structs: because who needs struct overlays when FFT turns magic bytes into a disco mix?

  5. Anonymous

    Using Audacity as a hex editor: finally a tool where endianness bugs are audible - misaligned structs click right at IMGDATA_MAGIC and the padding keeps the beat

  6. Anonymous

    Nothing screams enterprise tooling like annotating binary structs in Audacity because procurement won’t approve 010 Editor - offsets measured in samples, endianness set to stereo

  7. @Ra_zor 2y

    Well, he definetely have the audacity

  8. @WaterCat73 2y

    For those, who actually need the answer: Notepad++ with "HEX-editor" plugin. However, it's Windows only

  9. @sylfn 2y

    THE WHAT

  10. @karanokyoukai 2y

    010editor

  11. @callofvoid0 2y

    dahell is that spectrum

    1. @SamsonovAnton 2y

      It's not a spectrum — it's a waveform.

  12. @callofvoid0 2y

    oh shit is this an audio player?

    1. @ElektrischInkorrekt 2y

      No, it's an audio editing program.

    2. @colllapse 2y

      audio editor

  13. @Diotost 2y

    Use it to edit Commodore 64 datasettes

  14. @Kyngo 2y

    yo wtf 💀

  15. @leandrofriedrich 2y

    Lmfao i just got this, coincidence?

    1. @callofvoid0 2y

      definetly no

  16. @FunnyGuyU 2y

    Can you really use Audacity for hex editing?

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