I mastered a CD in 2000 for a band that wanted a secret track at the end. I came up with a novel way to do it.
There were a dozen regular tracks. A bunch of empty ones. And the final track over about a dozen tracks of varying length with no gap. Used all 99 tracks.
I could only pull it off with this CD burning software that didn’t have a UI. It took a text file as input at the command line. But it could do everything from almost every color of spec (Red Book, Blue Book, etc) for CDs.
I've had visions of putting a CD together that was that way, but with pregaps and indexes utilized as well.
"WTF? The time counter keeps going forward, and then sometimes it goes backwards! And using the track seek buttons completely eliminates some parts that I can hear if I don't touch anything!
It's a whole different song entirely when you program tracks 39, 40, and 52 in a loop, and IDFK what it is with this Index number that only always showed "1" before.
Oh wait. Srsly? From tracks 71-93, it's using the index to count beats...and the track number to count measures? No, that can't be it. Except...."
I thought I'd really (ab)used the CD specs, but don't recall ever trying indexes. Curious how most CD players, which only had a two-digit track indicator, handled indexes. I would have used that if I had known about it.
I wasn't aware these existed either. I suspect the answer is incredibly boring: most CD players simply wont seek to an index, pressing skip track will just skip to the next track ignoring any indexes present.
There were a dozen regular tracks. A bunch of empty ones. And the final track over about a dozen tracks of varying length with no gap. Used all 99 tracks.
I could only pull it off with this CD burning software that didn’t have a UI. It took a text file as input at the command line. But it could do everything from almost every color of spec (Red Book, Blue Book, etc) for CDs.