hidden track

While I like the use of backtracks as hidden tracks (like "Strange Days" on Sister Machine Gun's "Burn"), I detest hidden tracks that are put at the end of an album five minutes after the last track. TONS of bands do this, and there's really no point to it. In the era of cassettes, it was a reward for listening to the album all the way through. Once cassette players started using AMS, you could skip to the hidden track right away. With CDs, there's even less of a point. You can skip to the track right away. Not only that, but put a CD in just about any CD player, and you can see the time for each track.

Is there a hidden track? Hmmm. The last song is twenty minutes.... and it isn't a Pink Floyd album. Good bet there's a "hidden" track there.

Not only that, but its a little bit annoying ripping and encoding a twenty minute song when you know at least 12 minutes of that is silence. Sure, I can cut it up with a wave editor, but that's an extra step, only there to piss me off, especially since the hidden track is usually crap.

The artists think, "ooh, I'll be cool and different and put a special bonus track after 15 empty tracks or 20 minutes of silence." The record company thinks, "hey, we're paying for 13 songs but the back only says 12. We'd better but a big orange sticker on the packaging that says 'Contains unlisted bonus track "We're a Bunch of Wankers"!'"

Ones I have:

• Songs in the Key of X: I reccomend you hold the reverse button on the cd player past the beginning of the first track until the display reads -9.15. There's an excellent song by The Dirty Three, then another with Nick Cave and The Dirty Three.
• Cracker, Kerosene Hat: Track 69 (huhuhuhuh) is the fab song Eurotrash Girl; track 88 is some loud thing which I assume is called Drive my Car (that's what he keeps yelling); track 99 is an outtake from the title song.
• Beck: He puts these on all his albums. Mutations is the only one where it's an actual song, with lyrics and stuff, if I remember correctly. It's quite good, too.

Hidden Tracks never really phase me. I don't own an audio cd player, so the first thing i do when i buy a CD, is pop it in my computer and rip through it with Audio Catalyst. Now traditional after-the-last track hidden ones aren't that bad, they show up nice and easy, just have to do some creative encoding to get past all the crap they throw in front of it. Now, negative time ones require a bit more thought, and more knowing they exist.

Have to set the pre-rip thingy back to however far until the song starts is, so the ripper will start the "song" at negative time. I was bored, does that make it OK?

This can work both ways. I have copied a lot of CD's onto minidisc. My minidisc recorder doesn't bother recording silence when it drags on for more than about four seconds, so when I play the disc back I just hear the hidden track as if it was a normal one. This can get weird if I tell someone I liked the last track and they think I am talking about a different one. Sometimes it's good to just have a lie down in a quiet place.

A fun trend developed by creative musicians and engineers who wanted to give their audience a little extra for their buck. A secret track is just what the name implies: it is an extra music track on your newly purchased album that isn't listed in the song directory.

There are different ways of doing this, depending on the medium. I'll describe the most famous methods of accomplishing this with the following mediums: CD, DVD, vinyl, and cassette. Feel free to msg me about new methods and different mediums, and also if you should happen to know how and where this trend originated.

Compact Discs

The compact disc format offers some pretty inventive ways of hiding material.

• The most popular of which is the extended last track. It's a simple matter of letting the last track on the CD run on in silence, long after the song itself has finished. Most listeners aren't watching their CD player constantly while listening to their albums, and are aware that the CD player will turn itself off once the CD is finished, so there's a good chance they won't notice that the CD keeps running even though nothing's playing. Once you've lulled the listener into assurance that the CD is finished, usually after a couple of minutes of silence, you drop in the secret track.

  An album that deserves special mention for using this method ingeniously is Tool's ep, "Opiate". The secret song, "The Gaping Lotus Experience", starts 6 minutes and 6 seconds into the 6th (and final) track. Get it? :)

• Another way to do it is the track 99 trick. A CD can hold a maximum of 99 tracks (100, if you count track 0; see below). This is accomplished by having the tracks between the last official song and track 99 be blank -- usually two or three seconds of silence. So, say that your new CD has 14 official songs. Track 15-98 would then be blank, three-second silent affairs, and track 99 would contain the secret track.

  This method does give itself away easily, because once the listener inserts the CD, the CD player will most likely inform him/her how many tracks are on the CD.

  Notable uses of this method includes Nine Inch Nails' EP, "Broken", which included not one, but two secret tracks - both track 98 and 99 were used. Even more notable is Marilyn Manson's "Antichrist Superstar" LP, whose 99th track loops smoothly into the 1st track on the CD (if your player is set to 'repeat').

• Lastly, there is the track 0 method. Track 0 on a CD is usually reserved for the header information (how many tracks, how long, etc.). It is, however, also possible to store audio data on it. Since most people would assume an album begins with track 1 (as in, the first song), this is by far the cleverest method, imho.

  Since most CD players won't let you select track 0, the only way to listen to these tracks is to start playing track number 1, then rewind into track 0. Some new CD players, however, have caught on to these shenanigans and have made it possible for users to select track 0. The method isn't too popular, though, since some old CD players won't let you rewind past track 1.

  Albums that have used this track include the soundtrack to "X-Files: Fight the Future", as well as a Michael Jackson album (can't remember which).

Cassette tapes

As far as I know, there is only one way of including a secret track on cassette tapes. And it's not a very good one. This probably explains why producers/artists rarely include secret tracks on cassette version of their albums.

It is essentially the same trick as the "extended last track" described above - ie. extending the last song with some silence, then dropping the last track in.

DVD

Every day, manufacturers seem to devise more and more ingenious ways of hiding material on DVDs. Actually, it all merely boils down to hiding material on unused chapters of the DVD, but the methods with which to discover these are usually hidden in various obscure places. Some DVDs let you see the hidden material by highlighting hidden menu options; others require you to hit various buttons on your remote during the films playback. Still more require you to actually chapter search to the appropriate chapter.

The best way to find out if your new DVD disc has some hidden material on is to search the web. There are a number of databases online that make a living of cataloguing DVD secrets.

Vinyl records

Ahh, the good old vinyls! This is where you'll find some truly obscure ways of hiding material. You'd think a linear medium like the vinyl record, in the same way as the cassette tape, would be a tough one to hide material one, right? Not so.

• Obviously, you can do the extended last track thing, but it's too easy to spot. Nevertheless, I actually have a Slipknot picture disc that does this; apparently owing to a careless direct transfer from the CD original. Quite silly.

• A much better one is the double groove trick. You can't tell from looking at the vinyl, but one of the sides may be double-grooved. This means that there are two grooves running parallel to each other. If a secret track is hiding there, it all depends on which groove the pick-up lands in when you drop the needle. Of course, the vinyls would be engineered so that were you to start the vinyl from the first song, it would first make contact with the "correct" groove.

  A surprising number of albums actually do this. The one I know best is, again, Tool's EP, "Opiate". Here, depending on where you drop the needle, you will either hear the secret track, or the official song, "Cold and Ugly".

• Then there's the last groove trick, popularized by the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album. On the 2nd side, there is a final groove that runs in the "out" portion of the vinyl, between the end of the last track and the label. It is usually silent, but the Sgt. Pepper album actually includes a short, one-second snippet of random dialogue. The groove loops continuously, meaning if you were to construct a sensible ultra-short loop, you could actually make a secret track that repeated infinitely.

• Some vinyls have reportedly had hidden tracks on the center label itself. I haven't found conclusive evidence to support the existence of such secret tracks, but it's a definite possibility -- hence I've included it. Problematically, a lot of turntables will have problems playing the label, because the length of the arm wasn't constructed to reach that far. Furthermore, you would be leaving nasty finger prints on the grooves every time you picked up the vinyl (unless you were holding it on the edges).

Feel free to msg me with additions/corrections.