Okay, bear with me, this may take a while…
So I bought a CD burner and my friends and I are having loads of fun compiling discs of b-sides and rareties by our favorite artists. In the course of tracking down some Nick Cave obscurities, I recalled rumors of a truly “hidden” track on the X-Files soundtrack “Songs in the Key of X”. A friend informed me that the tracks could be found by hitting “play” and then scanning backwards from track 1… this is in fact true. In fact the disc has a disclaimer in the fine print: “This compact disc does not fully conform with Phillips “Red Book” specifications, in that the “pre-gap” may not play on all CD players.” I know that the “Red Book” is the code or protocol that governs how CD’s are made. So far so good.
But when I look at the disc using my extraction software (Adaptec Toast, Mac version), it shows only the normal 15 tracks on the album (same thing if I just click the disc icon on my desktop). I presume that this means that the information representing my two “hidden songs” resides not on a track per se, but in the gap before the track. I have seen many CD’s- particularly live albums-- “count down” from some negative number to zero between tracks. Now, I assume this is a similar phenomenon… crowd noise existing not on one track or the next, but between them… or am I wrong?
My question, then, is, basically, what the hell? Is there really “hidden” junk between the tracks on my CD’s, and if so, how can it be harvested? Ethical, not-for-profit home CD pirates want to know.
Rex
If you can’t get it by just reading the files in the drive, you can make a bitwise image which would capture all the data on the disk, but wouldn’t allow you to mix and match tracks, and probably wouldn’t be particularly useful to you.
You can always get it the old fashioned way. Play the track through a portable cdplayer or stereo, and put the output from that into the input of your soundcard, record. You’ll lose a tiny bit on the quality, but not much.
In effect the hidden track is just the remainder of the previous track with silence recorded between.
CD’s do have a form of formatting to enable the laser to follow the track even on the silent, non-data parts.
One way you could eliminate this is to convert the last track to a WAV files and use pretty much any simple sound editor to create two sounds samples, one for each track.
My favourite hidden track is on a Ben Folds Five CD where, once the penultimate song has finished, the CD player remains running for some time but if you watch the CD timer countdown it seems that there is much too little time remaining.
With around ten seconds left on the timer one resigns oneself to there being no hidden track and feel like one has wasted ones time and suddenly comes the announcement,
“OK, here’s your damn hidden track!”
(Or words to that effect)
Oddly, I was listening to that very CD. The hidden track is actually the last bit of the last track. The song ends at 4:21 and then you have a long silence, until 5:30, where somebody says, “Look, man, I got your hidden track right here, now. Right here, listen. Ben Folds is a f*cking sshle!”