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What's the point to a 'hidden track'? (1 Viewer)

RaulR

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Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar has a short, untitled bonus cut on track 99. It comes after 82 tracks of complete silence, each lasting 4 seconds. :rolleyes
 

NickSo

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Maybe not exactly on topic, but how bout those 12 empty tracks of silence before Korn's FOLLOW THE LEADER album?
 

Scott Ware

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Probably the most clever hidden track I've seen is on Tool's "Opiate" EP. In order to hear it on the CD version, you have to sit through several minutes of silence, like on most other CDs with hidden tracks. The vinyl version, however, is a bit trickier. I bought the vinyl version last year and was dissapointed to find that it did not include the hidden track (or so I thought...). It turns out that it's a double-grooved vinyl. For those of you who have never encountered one of those before, the way a double-grooved vinyl works is that there are two groves on one side. Depending on where the needle falls, it will play one of the two grooves. In the case of the "Opiate", one groove is the normal side two and the other is the hidden song.

Another method that NIN used (like Manson's "Anti-Christ Superstar") on the "Broken" EP was to put 99 tracks on the CD. Tracks 7-97 were silence. Track 98 was "Physical" and track 99 was "Suck". Earlier printings of the CD had one CD as the full EP and a second CD with the two bonus tracks on it.
 

StephenL

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J.River Media Center 10 (http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/) has a "Do not play silence" playback option:

"If this option is selected, the program skips long portions of silence during playback. This is quite useful for hidden tracks or tracks with a lot of leading or trailing silence. This option may not be a good choice for classical music or other genres that contain long, intentional pauses in the middle of songs."
 

Michael Were

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I too like the idea of the multiple silent tracks seperating out the "hidden track." It makes life so much easier when making mix discs. I really do love them when I find 'em on the first listen (except for Becks Odelay where it's just annoying).

Michael
 

Michael Hall

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Mr. Bungle's "Disco Volante" actually includes a hidden track along the lines of the "double groove" track you mentioned, Scott. On the CD, it's just part of track 3, but on the vinyl, you have to manually put the needle in the "hidden groove" to hear the song. The song is very good, and features someone (Patton?) doing vocals in a old-man voice talking about how "I found the secret song now/they wouldn't tell me/but somehow I found out." :) This has to be heard to get the full effect of the humor.

The hidden track that annoys me more than anything is the last track on Therapy?'s 1994 album "Troublegum" (one of my favorite discs of all time, hidden track aside). After the last track, a scratchy version of "You Are My Sunshine" plays and "away" skips for about six minutes, and after that it's record skipping (just the noise) for another ten minutes. Great album, but that irritates me to no end.

Sister Machine Gun's "Burn" CD has a hidden cover of "Strange Days" (which was supposed to have been on the SD film soundtrack at James Cameron's personal request, but Sony decided to put Prong on there doing a version that is remarkably similar to SMG's instead since Prong was a sony artist at the time) that is one of the "rewind" hidden tracks. Supposedly, Blind Melon did the "rewind" thing at one point as well, but I've never heard it so I can't really say if it's true or not.
 

John Milton

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Songs In The Key Of X, one of the X-Files series soundtracks includes two bonus tracks using the play track 1 and hit reverse method.

I used to keep track of which CDs had "hidden" tracks but I no longer keep it up to date. The list has 52 CDs with bonus tracks. All from the early to mid-90's.

I agree with many that the long periods of silence before a hidden song plays are annoying. CDs where the bonus track as it's own identity are much much nicer.

Is there a site which keeps track of hidden tracks? If not, perhaps we can start a list here. ;)
 

Tony-B

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You know what I find annoying about hidden tracks with just a long period of silence before them, the fact that it's so damn annoying to get it it!

For example, I love the hidden song (Eyeore) on Slipknot's self-titled album. However when I want to listen to it when I am driving, I have to fast forward through the last song, the silence, and the part with the band watching some sick porn movie or something. It just sucks having to fast forward through 10 minutes of stuff.
 

Andrew s wells

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for those who may want to know, evanescance have the rock version of my immortal as an unlisted bonus track on the newest releases of the album. (my borther got it.. thats how I found out).. lucky for my I like the album version much better so no loss to me. :D
 

David_Stein

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cracker's kerosene hat had an even more annoying version of of the 85+ tracks of silence then a bonus song, they actually set it up so the bonus tracks were something like 69, 79, and 98 (those are probably wrong, its been a long time since i actually listened to the cd) seperated by 3 second silent tracks. all you could do is fast forward til you heard some real sound coming from the "fast forward sound" and then skip around til you got to the right one. it sucked because i liked the one hidden song.
 

Clint B

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I'm surprised that what must be one of the oldest "hidden tracks" out there hasn't been mentioned yet...at the end of the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" album, there are several seconds of silence (supposedly they actually play a dog whistle here, inaudible to human ears), followed by a bunch of gibberish...it sounds like they probably cut up tape, threw it up in the air, and put it back together in a somewhat random way. I know this bit (called "the Inner Groove", I believe) is on the CD and the LP, but I'm not sure about the cassette.
 

Malcolm R

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I'm not a fan of hidden tracks either. If they were simply spaced a few seconds after the end of the preceding song, it wouldn't be as bad. But the several minutes of silence followed by a song (that's usually of questionable quality anyway) is very annoying.

I recently got an album that has both a "rewind" hidden track included before Track 1, as well as a regular hidden track at the 9:00 mark of Track 14.

In this case, they're both pretty good songs, so I simply queued them up on my CD player and burned copies using my CDR deck. Now I don't have to futz with the original CD anymore to hear the tracks. :)
 

Henry Gale

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Also irritating is the "Hidden Post" that comes nearly 3 years after the rest of the thread. :)

I think I have a new champion. Listening to John Fahey's "Red Cross" CD this evening I noticed the timer counting down from over 16 minutes before the last cut played.
 

John Garcia

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On Tool's Undertow, the hidden track is done the same way as NIN's broken, except it is track 69...

Talk about digging up a thread...
 

Lucia Duran

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Marcy Playground's album Shapeshifter has a hidden track at the end of Our Generation. The track is 8 minutes and 13 seconds long and the hidden track appears at 7 minutes and 14 seconds.
 

John Garcia

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On Staind's first album, Tormented, the last track 4 Walls is 33min. long. There are about 5-6 mins of silence after the song end, then some soft notes play and what I believe are burial rights are read in the background during part of the track.

On some of Staind's releases of Break the Cycle (it is not on all discs, and isn't listed), the hidden track Excess Baggage, an acoustic track, starts at 16:19 of the last track, which is 21:01.
 

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