a brick pause. picture (cc) by jeremy brooks.

with tapes it was easy to understand: press the pause button and your tape was physically brought to a halt. not a stop, but a true jam on the rolling tape. long pauses were considerably bad for the magnetic plastic. but: how does this work with mp3 (/ogg/wav/etc)? is the hard drive’s magnetic head literally hovering until the pause is unpaused? is this bad for that bit?  funny project by lush by the way, check the mp3 of taped delay. (kp)