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Weekend Reading: 10 materials on Easter eggs, rhythm games and free audio samples

Today in our collection there will be a lot of interesting things: we’ll talk about Easter eggs in vinyl releases, hidden tracks on Audio CDs, strange user videos on YouTube, soundtracks for games and tracks that have been wired up by popular operating systems.

Everyone who is tired of the news about the pandemic and the dollar, we invite you to cat.


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From secret messages to vinyl software. If you want to hide something on this medium, there are ways that are worthy of James Bond. For example, take a multilateral record and write a secret on it. For the first time this was done at the beginning of the last century. To find the easter egg, you had to position the needle of the player correctly. By the way, Jack White went further and hid a couple of tracks under a paper label in the center of the record. Another way to leave a secret message is to write it backwards. Over time, such reports have even developed several conspiracy theories. But the coolest thing is to put a PC program on the vinyl, although in the material we did not ignore the more obvious options for placing Easter eggs - hidden images that appear when the envelopes come in contact with water or under ultraviolet light.

What audiohooks were hidden in the pre-gap on the Audio CD. In this article, we talk about how and who “burned” hidden tracks on CDs. For example, Rammstein recorded a secret intro in this block with screaming spectators of their show, Brand New placed pre-gap telephone conversations on top of each other, and Unkle recorded tracks that inspired them to record the album as an Easter egg. By the way, listening to all this just doesn’t work out - in our material we will try to figure out where to start to get to the secret messages on CD.

What kind of music was “wired” in popular OS. If you are millennial or older, you should definitely remember the “Samples of music” folder. Our material is dedicated to tracks from different versions of OSes. In the early nineties - the era of the first sound cards - in Windows 3.1, two passages were sewn up - Bach and Vivaldi. And two more tracks showed the capabilities of a MIDI sequencer. One of them, CANYON.MID even has covers . In Windows 95, one easter egg was added - CLOUDS.MID, which simply could not be heard. In the 98th version, three more new tracks appeared, one of them was given the glory of the worst MIDI composition from the company. Then came ME and XP (it was in XP that the first folder “Music Samples” first appeared). In the end, we talk about what played in Vista and in Windows 7 and how the era of music preinstalled on operating systems ended.

Free music for cola lovers and cooked breakfasts . In this article, we talk about what could be obtained complete with the products of popular brands: from shellac plates to cassettes with jazz, rock or classical music. Customers were given music by those brands that were not connected with it: Kellogg's breakfasts included collections of hits and CD-samples. And Post Cereals suggested people cut plates from their packages. Even 7UP took part in this story with two-liter bottles of their drink - cassettes with MTV hits went to them.

More gifts for attentive listeners. We write about the approaches that are worthy of Robert Langdon: from scratches to the surface closer to the center of the disk (for example, Joy Division did) to the spectrographics used by Aphex Twin. But The Dead Kennedys did the most original thing, making it a secret message ... silence - it occupies the entire second side of one of their albums.


Music and videos that no one should have found . In this article, we talk about services that specialize in randomly issuing the rarest and strangest videos on the network. If you are wondering who might need it, Reddit has a whole community of people looking for such things: from deep-fake videos to unusual ads.

Eight Beats: About sounds in old games . Is there at least one person among us who doesn’t sing the main topic from the game about the mustache plumber Mario? This material is saturated with tears of nostalgia - we are talking about the formation of Pong, where in 1972 the very sound of a hit against a “racket” appeared. Do not forget about the innovations that improved the soundtrack of games with each release.

What projects put on sound and made it part of the genre. We talk about games where the sound is part of the mechanics (not a single Guitar Hero). Starting with the iconic series for the Nintendo DS Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, for her part of the music was written by the authors of the soundtrack to Steel Alchemist. Next, we talk about the Crypt of the Necrodancer “bagel” - a quest in which the player acts the more efficiently the better he gets into the rhythm. In the Bit.Trip Runner platformer, the musical accompaniment helps with the passage of levels, well, but about the Beat Saber for VR I did not hear only the lazy.


Photo LSDFOR Society / Unsplash

12 thematic resources with tracks licensed under Creative Commons. We made a selection for everyone who is looking for musical accompaniment for their developments. We tell, in particular, about the “Holy Grail” among musical resources, about where to get music from independent authors, about a resource that is supervised by an entire radio station and about sites organized by individual composers.

Where to get audio samples to develop your projects . We discuss where you can find short sounds, various effects and samples. There are resources with background sounds, and collections of jingles. As in the previous collection, next to each link, the advantages and disadvantages of each platform were described in detail, as well as the prices for licenses.

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