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How the Hidden Track Faded from Recorded Music

8 points by shortformblog 11y ago

BrainInAJar 11y ago
Surely an artist could hide another track with steganography if they wanted to. I mean Richard James hid a photo of his own face in the spectrogram of Aphex Twin's "Equation"
pavement 11y ago
Hidden tracks were pointless with the advent of compact discs. Arguably, in any medium, it was trivially evident that there might still be content remaining on a record or a cassette based on eyeballing the position of the needle, or the remaining thickness of the tape spool, but you still had to carefully scan for audible audio. With CDs, skipping to specific times, while monitoring the audio was fast, accurate and reliable. Now, with digital audio files, clipping hidden tracks out of long durations of silence is so easy, it's not really worth the effort to concatenate two songs adjoined by a period of fixed silence. Instead of providing an Easter egg of beloved content, in an otherwise left-over section of an audio format's recording medium, it's mostly just annoying and disruptive to what might've been an otherwise enjoyably seamless and regular member of many playlists.
- jfolkins 11y ago
  As a child of the 80s, when the switch from tape to CD did arrive, I remember finding a pregap easter egg on accident. I didn't know what it was at the time or how it got there, but it blew my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregap "Such hidden tracks can be played by playing the first song and "rewinding" (more accurately, seeking in reverse) until the actual start of the whole CD audio track."
  - dec0dedab0de 11y ago
    Very Proud of Ya by AFI has a pregap hidden song. When I found it I called my friends up and told them about it, and we all went through all of our cds rewinding the first track. I'm not sure if we found any others.
soylentcola 11y ago
Along similar lines (but not anything "hidden") is the song (songs?) "Fingertips" on They Might Be Giants' "Apollo 18". It's not that the song is hidden but it was another bit of fun to be had with the newly mainstream CD format in the early 90's. When most people bought albums on vinyl and cassette, sequential listening was the norm. Sure, you could skip ahead by moving the needle on a turntable or FF/RW on a tape deck but mostly it was one track after another. But since CD included such novel features as "shuffle" and custom track order, TMBG split "Fingertips" (a series of shorter 5-20sec songs and phrases) into 21 separate tracks. The end result was that listening on shuffle led to these random little snippets popping up in weird places between the longer, "proper" songs on the album. Not the same gimmick as a hidden track but a fun bit of novelty nonetheless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXmBs1OppXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXmBs1OppXw

8 points by shortformblog 11y ago

Surely an artist could hide another track with steganography if they wanted to. I mean Richard James hid a photo of his own face in the spectrogram of Aphex Twin's "Equation"

pavement 11y ago

Hidden tracks were pointless with the advent of compact discs. Arguably, in any medium, it was trivially evident that there might still be content remaining on a record or a cassette based on eyeballing the position of the needle, or the remaining thickness of the tape spool, but you still had to carefully scan for audible audio. With CDs, skipping to specific times, while monitoring the audio was fast, accurate and reliable. Now, with digital audio files, clipping hidden tracks out of long durations of silence is so easy, it's not really worth the effort to concatenate two songs adjoined by a period of fixed silence. Instead of providing an Easter egg of beloved content, in an otherwise left-over section of an audio format's recording medium, it's mostly just annoying and disruptive to what might've been an otherwise enjoyably seamless and regular member of many playlists.

jfolkins 11y ago
As a child of the 80s, when the switch from tape to CD did arrive, I remember finding a pregap easter egg on accident. I didn't know what it was at the time or how it got there, but it blew my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregap "Such hidden tracks can be played by playing the first song and "rewinding" (more accurately, seeking in reverse) until the actual start of the whole CD audio track."
- dec0dedab0de 11y ago
  Very Proud of Ya by AFI has a pregap hidden song. When I found it I called my friends up and told them about it, and we all went through all of our cds rewinding the first track. I'm not sure if we found any others.

soylentcola 11y ago

Along similar lines (but not anything "hidden") is the song (songs?) "Fingertips" on They Might Be Giants' "Apollo 18". It's not that the song is hidden but it was another bit of fun to be had with the newly mainstream CD format in the early 90's. When most people bought albums on vinyl and cassette, sequential listening was the norm. Sure, you could skip ahead by moving the needle on a turntable or FF/RW on a tape deck but mostly it was one track after another. But since CD included such novel features as "shuffle" and custom track order, TMBG split "Fingertips" (a series of shorter 5-20sec songs and phrases) into 21 separate tracks. The end result was that listening on shuffle led to these random little snippets popping up in weird places between the longer, "proper" songs on the album. Not the same gimmick as a hidden track but a fun bit of novelty nonetheless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXmBs1OppXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXmBs1OppXw