Comment 28 for bug 586174

When "Write metadata to files" is disabled, the checksums are now identical, even with the lyrics plugin enabled. The id3 tags are also unchanged.

>"If the checksums don't change, then we'll know that Banshee no longer corrupts files when playing them."
My issue with that is: I want to leave the "Write metadata to files" option checked when I'm using Banshee. That way if I make changes to the normal id3 tags of my music in Banshee, they're saved in the actual music file. I'm still not quite sure why the lyrics plugin writes the lyrics to an id3 tag. Even more concerning is why writing the lyrics to an id3 tag corrupts the audio (which the upstream developer also acknowledged). What I'd really like to see: "even if the checksums do change (if the write option is enabled), Banshee will no longer corrupt files when playing them." This may very well be true now. However I can't be sure at this point. It's looking promising though. I haven't gotten any corruption yet, but I'm going to keep trying with the write option enabled and the lyrics plugin enabled just to see.

Also, I have never had the equalizer enabled in Banshee and this distortion is/was not an equalizer problem. Once the music files were corrupted by Banshee, the same distortion was also present when opening the music file in Totem and Rhythmbox.