Hear me out, you can append any data at the end of JPEG image without corrupting it. It can also be raw PCM audio, and then it could be played with aplay and a bit of wait because you’ll also listen to the image itself at first.
Half the time, people seem to upload otherwise perfectly complete still pictures as reel with some dumb music over it because if you’re not constantly assaulted by the same popular song snippets over and over on every post, are you even paying attention?
Particularly pernicious are ones with some sad or bittersweet content that will have some variant of “generic slow piano with a female, breathy voice singing some words that sound sad but you couldn’t actually tell what it’s about without listening to more than the five seconds used in this looping video”.
Yeah, well, it’s awful and annoying and shitty and I wish it’d stop doing that. I wish it’d stop doing a lot of things, to be honest, but that’s beside the point.
I don’t use it, but my GF does. She’ll have the volume up for some video that does interest her, then be scrolling through and treat me to the audible part of that trend without even seeing the funny / cute / insightful / boring picture to accompany and potentially compensate the acoustic pollution. She’s thoroughly numbed to it, but I’m not and I hate it.
(I’ve dropped the idea of getting her to quit the app, that battle just isn’t worth fighting.)
The link wouldn’t work so I had to resort to a screenshot.
Thank you for muting it!
It’s not working I can still hear the screams
Hear me out, you can append any data at the end of JPEG image without corrupting it. It can also be raw PCM audio, and then it could be played with
aplay
and a bit of wait because you’ll also listen to the image itself at first.There you go:

(https://files.explosm.net/comics/Dave/genieweek2.png?t=2161CF)
The original was seemingly taken down, but it’s archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210305031852/https://explosm.net/comics/4584/Edit: just saw that the link simply broke over time and leads to an incorrect page now for some reason. https://explosm.net/comics/dave-genieweek-2 is the new location.
So why is there a unmute button on your comic strip?
It’s a screenshot from Instagram. That’s what OP was trying to say.
Instagram always does this?
Half the time, people seem to upload otherwise perfectly complete still pictures as reel with some dumb music over it because if you’re not constantly assaulted by the same popular song snippets over and over on every post, are you even paying attention?
Particularly pernicious are ones with some sad or bittersweet content that will have some variant of “generic slow piano with a female, breathy voice singing some words that sound sad but you couldn’t actually tell what it’s about without listening to more than the five seconds used in this looping video”.
I believe this is because Instagram’s algorithm currently favours reels over still images
Yeah, well, it’s awful and annoying and shitty and I wish it’d stop doing that. I wish it’d stop doing a lot of things, to be honest, but that’s beside the point.
I don’t use it, but my GF does. She’ll have the volume up for some video that does interest her, then be scrolling through and treat me to the audible part of that trend without even seeing the funny / cute / insightful / boring picture to accompany and potentially compensate the acoustic pollution. She’s thoroughly numbed to it, but I’m not and I hate it.
(I’ve dropped the idea of getting her to quit the app, that battle just isn’t worth fighting.)
I, too, wish it would stop existing. It’s a great place to upload stuff, so long as you’re okay with that stuff getting nicked wholesale
Only when the post author chooses to include sound.
IG’s stills-meme meta is prob mostly with background music