Does anyone know how to access and rip the hidden tracks on the X-Files Songs in the Key of X soundtrack CD on a Mac?
For those who don’t know, the CD (a collection of music featured in the X-Files television show) contains a liner note that says, “Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that ‘0’ is also a number.” When you put the CD in a CD player and, rather than hitting ‘Play’, you hit the ‘Rewind’ button (not the ‘Skip Back’ button), you can rewind to the -9:15 mark and find two hidden tracks by Nick Cave and the Dirty Three. The first is “Time Iesum Transeuntem et non Reverendem” (Dread the Passage of Jesus for He Will Not Return), and the second is a cover of the X-Files theme.
Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t seem to want to scan backwards past the 0:00 mark! I can’t scan backwards, nor can I put a negative value into the ‘Start Time’ option. I looked at the audio file that the Finder displays, but it only reads as 3:25, so it looks like the Finder isn’t reading the extra information either. I even checked it on my “normal” CD player (as it has an optical audio out that I could plug into my G5), but it’s new enough that it isn’t reading the extra bits either.
Has anyone found a way to pull the hidden information off on a Mac? I’d love to know (or, alternately, if anyone happens to have a 128kbps AAC rip of the two tracks, that’d be nice too…)!
Have you tried putting the track in a different position in a playlist or just giving it a different track number? You can then start at the end of the previous track and hopefully the negative numbers will kick in when the track is lined up in the sequence.
I tried experimenting with manually setting the Start Time in your iTunes Music Library.xml file in home->Music->iTunes
Sadly, adding the following line under a track’s <dict>:
<key>Start Time</key><string>-9150</string>
didn’t seem to work, iTunes would just overwrite the setting when it relaunched. You might find another way though.
You might also want to try playing the track in Quicktime. Or find an older CD player :)
Good luck, and good job on the live preview!
I have got both tracks in various digital formats, including aac. I can help you getting them into your itunes, please advise of an email address that I can direct this to….
Derek