Believe it or not, straight to jail

A word processor like MS Word or LibreOffice Writer will probably refuse to open it, giving some error such as “unsupported file type.”

Depending on how much of a nerd you are, the plaintext editor your OS comes with may either also refuse to open it, or open it as if it were plaintext and you might see a few jumbles of letters and punctuation, or weird symbols if it interprets it as unicode. According to Vim, my mp3 copy of Glycerine by Bush is mostly @ symbols. I noticed that my Bash shell didn’t want to autocomplete “Vim glycerine.mp3” but when typed manually it did it with minimal fuss.

If you open it in a hex editor, you might be surprised to see the first few lines are readable, they likely contain metadata that media player software like VLC can understand, like the track name, artist, year of release and such. Scroll down further and you’ll start to see more gibberish where it’s trying to interpret the individual bytes that make up the audio as ASCII characters. Funnily enough hexedit gave me a different looking bunch of gibberish than Vim did.

Try it and see. It won’t hurt anything.

I am assuming it inputs the byte stream of the file to the text parser and only glibberish comes out

The app will find the file incomprehensible and will tell you that the file is corrupted or in a format the app can’t understand.

An app that works with raw next (Windows’ Editor or notepad++ or any IDE) will try to parse the binary data as text and fail miserably, showing you lots of undecodable-unicode characters.

Example:

%.š/BûT¹Ò;lŠ^œ{åúvž’Û X“—دa%“9HúU”¿ú¦¥N̉Čԝ¿†«dd’º•©“ÜÈê*è9$mÕ lfN‹„‘ª$bÿû°@§  gÂqâ`tŒøn<cm-‰Ljmð3¡|ñ°k§û–ÿîo<©ªxgTZ¯óT†"x¦1Q®ÔÚóI# 3édgþ™>´dʶ̏þB…o™ÜË7bMûö”]«ê|=®©w„Ïɳ²NdÅh˜Ñ#´¦ïÕ®ºAd`‹®«R²•]‡ÐÏEpäX 0PÛnE”Ø΋şçÒñD]îbwNðèB$¤“nnzráiqÖ›XåÄvØÉË\ø\¦P¼¶Xæ‰Â6…”ææ†?äÖåœ:m|?B3C+dW»f†`Ê$Lˆmìóz¯xK>‘)ƒÜÉTÝ¨@‘Š£Ð:¨õ¹|!„DQC#£öªJ¼×u›³ÕÒ©˜gV"!V«;áäi³EJ…3;zã[±0&ËsÖ_Ë·³‡ó8MaTô”ÖBïKßïùl4zHJE’N¢ìo™iÒg$½›—U.ºtÉW›SXGÓÐŒ§N¢–L¨YþïZOPNìÌÙŸN ŽŠióyÄ,QÍfÙ¬