Hidden tracks on CDs used to be a pretty common thing. Not “real” hidden tracks: You could play tricks with the directory structure and put a track before the first one, so you have to skip back from 1 to get to 0.
No, the common way to do this is to pad the final track with, say, ten minutes of silence, and then the “hidden” song starts.
While the concept of hidden tracks is fun, in practice it’s really annoying, because it means that you’re sitting there listening to silence for ten minutes.
So once upon a time I wrote a little C program that would look for silences in the last track of all the CDs I have ripped, and if it finds (long) silences, then splitting happens.
As CDs are getting less popular as a means of distribution (to put it mildly), the hidden track thing has all but disappeared, too, but this week I got
the new Deathcrush album, and it employs this tactic.
I started looking around for the scripts to split the file, and then I discovered that it was in an obscure region of my home directory, not touched for ten years, and not put on Microsoft Github.
It’s probably a couple of decades too late to be useful to anybody, but there you go. It compiles and everything on the current Debian, which just amazes me. I mean, I wrote it in… like… 2003?
Go Linux.
I love hidden anything, especially when it comes to technology. That said, I read recently that CDs are making a comeback in the wake of the return of vinyl.