As promised a little bit fast last week I want to start a series of articles about manipulating Bits and Bytes with AIR.

This is quite a hard task for me because:
– I’m not used to write
– I’m not used to write in English
– the whole Byte/Bits stuff is new to me
– I’m lazy and announcing a series of articles is kind of a pressure

Anyway I decided to do it because I think the whole topic really has a lot of potential for AIR and Flex and I hope it can be useful for people like me that have never before worked on such a low level with files. And this is also a chance for me to archive all the knowledge I’ve gain over the last few months.
On the other hand this is an excuse for not open sourcing the code for RichFLV and RichMp3 so far. I hope that this series will enable you to write your own implementation.

This could all be a bit boring for real computer geeks and i even cannot promise that these articles aren`t full of mistakes but i hope that your comments will turn it into something useful.

I would like to write this in the form of a book chapter and I will attach a PDF at the end of each new article that will contain all updates and corrections:
Here is a brief overview of what I want to cover:

INTRODUCTION
BINARY NUMBERS – IT`S STILL JUST NUMBERS
BITS AND BYTES
BITWISE OPERATORS
ANALYZING HEADERS
CUTTING MP3S
ID3V2 TAG FORMAT
FINDING ID3TAGS
ANALYZING THE CONTENT OF ID3 TAGS
MANIPULATING ID3 TAGS
CONCLUSION
WHAT ELSE TO DO WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE?

In the end we should end up with something like RichMp3.
I hope to write a chapter once a week but no promise on this.
I will upload the introduction in the next hour. All comments, critics and corrections are very welcome!