I originally thought that hidden tracks on albums were just tracks added at the end of the album and not listed on the sleeve notes but after doing a bit of reading it seems the history of why artists put hidden tracks on their albums is, in some cases, quite interesting. For example to avoid controversy (Guns n’ Roses, “Look at your game, girl”, The Spaghetti Incident?) by “hiding” the track or to sneak a track onto an album that might cause legal or copyright violations (Ramones, “Cry Baby Cry“, Loco).
The methods by which tracks were hidden on vinyl records is also more interesting than I realised: I knew about the method of hiding tracks at the end of an album often separated from the “final” track by an extended period of silence (on vinyl this is sometimes visible by a different density of the groove). I wasn’t aware of the “double-groove” method though, which to me is a more genuinely “hidden” track and quite ingenious. Continue Reading »
Here’s a recommendation for a piece of softare I’ve been using for a couple of years. Autostitch is a fantastic piece of software for creating panoramic images and the results are nothing short of amazing. I’ve tried several photo-stitching applications in the past: some require lots of manual intervention to approximately align the photos in the correct order, others produce distorted or blurry images. Autostitch has none of these problems, just import a bunch of pictures and it works out which of them are part of the same scene (it will exclude any that don’t fit but it’s quicker if you only select the images you want to join together), it works out which images need to go where, and it then creates a single panoramic image. Another great feature is that it can create 2-dimensional panoramas – most other applications only create 1D panoramas so the camera has to be panned in the x- or y-axis but not both. This is great for creating an image where you can’t get a wide enough shot to include the whole scene -for example when photographing a building on a narrow road where can’t position the camera far enough away to fit it all in. Oh, and did I mention that autostitch is free?
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