I’ve done it! Those shifty buggers from Hybrid have been sneaking in uber-stealthy hidden tracks onto their CDs! These tracks lurk in the negative time of track 1 and appear on their albums Morning Sci-Fi and I Choose Noise. I’ve been scratching my head for a couple of years about how the hell I’m going to rip them properly. No more of this rewinding and analog recording crap. I’ve finally figured out how to rip them digitally. Google and Exact Audio Copy to the rescue.

The idea is that you rewind the first track past 0:00, but most CD players (and ripping apps) are too stupid to do this. When I bought Morning Sci-Fi it was weeks before I stumbled upon a website saying the album contained a hidden track called Lights Go Down, Knives Come Out. I tried ripping it with the usual suspects (CDex, Nero) to no avail. What!? Something I can’t rip? Surely that’s not possible. In the end, I borrowed Zac’s Discman and recorded the analog audio *cringe* then removed all the bloody noise and hiss. Not ideal, I know. When I Choose Noise came out I wasn’t expecting the guys to break tradition, and sure enough there was Everything Is Brand New listed in the liner notes. This being the age of MP3, I have long since ditched my Discman and none of the CD/DVD players in the house could play it. So I did what should have been done long ago. I googled it.

Apparently, only certain CD/DVD drives are able to physically rewind past 0:00 and my Pioneer DVR-108 had no problems doing it. So if your drive supports it, Exact Audio Copy can rip tracks sector by sector. So using the Copy Range tool, I just told it to extract from block 0 to block 20000 which is about 4 mins 26 seconds. You can tell how long your hidden track is in the main window by reading the start time of track 1. Now all that’s left is to encode it to Ogg. Too easy… when you know how.