Back

A lost X-Files song

455 points8 monthstwitter.com
netsharc8 months ago

Somewhat related, in that involves the X-Files and hidden songs, the CD of X-Files related music had a "Track 0" that can be accessed by rewinding beyond 0:00 of track 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_in_the_Key_of_X:_Music_f...

> Producers used the Compact Disc's pregap, so a listener would have to actually manually rewind the first track a full nine minutes to hear two additional hidden tracks, "Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum" and a cover of The X-Files theme song, both performed by Nick Cave and Dirty Three.[20] This is hinted at in the album's liner booklet, which notes "Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that "0" is also a number".[21] The use of these hidden tracks has been described as "just the sort of surprise one might have suspected from a show that deals in unexplainable mysteries".[22] Not all CD or DVD players will allow the album to be "rewound" back to these tracks as this violates Red Book standards.[23]

sickcodebruh8 months ago

I remember finding that secret track based on that "0 is also a number" and being blown away. IIRC there's at least one other secret song in another track's pre-roll.

jgtrosh8 months ago

Another amazing track 0, which is described in the (extensively long) album title as having been “lost”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_of_the_Remixes

mrexroad8 months ago

I want to believe!

Thanks for that, I wasn’t aware of this (it was my sister’s CD back in the day). Things like this are a nice reminder of when I believed in more things, when stuff was done for passion rather than profit and being a nerd meant something other than being dismissed as a techbro or whatever people say now. Ok, taking off my rose-tinted-nostalgia glasses now. Things are always fantastic and things are always broken, only depends on where (and why) you focus.

Yodel09148 months ago

Loved that track, and the adventure of finding it.

I'm not sure how "lost" it is, but I always have trouble finding the Foo Fighters cover of Down In The Park off that album.

dsXLII8 months ago

I really thought this thread would be about this. I recently tracked down a copy of the CD, specifically to see if I could export these pre-gap tracks. (No luck so far, but I've only tried modern stuff; I probably need to look for a more retro drive and ripping software.)

mavhc8 months ago

https://github.com/thomas-mc-work/most-possible-unattended-r...

Step 1: find the best cd drive, set offset Step 2: rip drives, uses musicbrainz to find metadata Step 3: it checks the hash it's ripped with AccurateCD

You can alter the script to not abort on unreadable tracks if you wish

r7218 months ago

There were lists of drives which can extract HTOA (on Hydrogenaudio or dBpoweramp forums), but I couldn't find one now. I have a vague memory that Lite-On had quite a few capable models.

UPD Here's a list: https://www.daefeatures.co.uk/search?htoa=Yes

mackman8 months ago

Whoa, I had no idea. This is one of my favorite albums. I have the FLAC rip of the CD on my phone. Does anybody know how I could actually rip that zero track? iTunes didn’t do it.

r7218 months ago

The keyword to search is "HTOA" ("Hidden Track One Audio"):

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=HTOA

I think you also need to find CD/DVD drive which can extract HTOA, not all drives can do it. There were lists (one of them is linked in Hydrogenaudio article), but I think those are severely outdated now.

alibosworth8 months ago

I haven’t used it for years, but EAC was the gold standard for ripping. This thread mentions a few other options as well:

https://community.metabrainz.org/t/best-way-to-rip-pre-gap-t...

ZuLuuuuuu8 months ago

This was wonderful to read. It reminded something that happened to me:

During early 2000s me and my friend used to create custom Counter-Strike maps because we enjoyed mapping. We created several maps but almost none of them got played on internet servers because people liked to stick with more known maps like de_dust or cs_assault.

Maybe 10 years later somebody asked me via some messenger or email if I still had the .bsp file of a particular map of ours. I was very surprised about this message because it was so random at that point in my life, I already moved on to other hobbies than mapping. But apparently the map was a hit among Turkish internet cafes and people were looking for the BSP file to play it after internet cafes lost their popularity and everybody had internet at their homes.

Sarkie8 months ago

Do you remember the name? Might be fun to play!

ZuLuuuuuu8 months ago

The map was cs_filistin (Palestine in Turkish). Note that I wasn't even 18 at that time and had no idea about politics. There was an official CS map named cs_iraq which looked unique to me and I just wanted to create something similar.

I put all the maps I worked on to my web site with some screenshots, comments from me and my friend (in Turkish) and download links.

You can find cs_filistin here:

http://www.canol.info/maps/counter_strike/cs_filistin/ (I need to install an SSL certificate, I haven't updated the web site in years)

You can find my other maps here:

http://www.canol.info/maps/counter_strike/

rob748 months ago

Another aside: I only recently made the connection between the ancient Philistines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines) and Palestine when a speech by Erdogan supporting Palestine was shown on the news and it had a slogan with "something something Filistin" in the background...

froh8 months ago

o-O thank you for pointing this out. wow and duh. it's kinda sorta obvious, in hindsight.

danirod8 months ago

I find stories about lost media intriguing and I am happy that this one got resolved.

There is an online subcommunity both on YouTube and Reddit trying to discover a lost song based on a 17 second audio clip found online a couple of years ago. So far, no luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_Knows_That_(Ulterior_...

Honorable mention to The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Mysterious_Song_on_th...

fudged718 months ago

Is there a subreddit for lost media?

Internet Archive reached out to me (personally?) because there was an audio file from the original Minecraft - the sound of a cow. I had made a comment about the sound on Reddit many years ago, so they reached out asking if I still have it on a hard drive somewhere

crtasm8 months ago

yes, r/lostmedia

the-rc8 months ago

If anyone is into musical mysteries, there's a bunch of Zappa fragments that might be quotes from his or others' works, something that he did all the time:

https://www.zappateers.com/fzshows/mystery.html

Every time I hear #4, I think a bit of La donna è mobile, ...

tomcam8 months ago

Definitely not. I’ve sung La donna è mobile a zillion times. Also, damn, was his guitar going out of tune or what? Maybe he’s playing one of those 1970s Stratocasters that just wouldn’t behave.

TillE8 months ago

That does sound a lot like Darren Hayes, as Wikipedia suggests. Specifically the lower-pitched singing of "you've got"; it sounds exactly like a signature Savage Garden thing.

Every artist has demo tapes with songs they've written but never published, and a lot of obscure stuff got leaked in the heyday of filesharing.

twic8 months ago

More generally, these are instances of Lostwave: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lostwave/

cmdlineluser8 months ago

There seem to be a few articles about it now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/12/06/x-files-son...

An update from one of the songwriters: https://www.joneshouseband.com/about-2

JamieDawsonCode8 months ago

Apparently Dan and Glenn had 4 hours to write and submit the song! Imagine throwing together a song in 4 hours and then finding out that people loved the song so much that they tracked you online 25 year later.

pavel_lishin8 months ago

Imagine being so skilled that you can whip up a whole amazing song in four hours! I'm not sure if I could create anything beautiful in four hours.

seanhunter8 months ago

Charles Mingus was onstage with his band when he was told that Lester Young had died. He called a short minute break and while his band went and got themselves a drink, wrote and arranged (for an 8-piece band) "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"[1] in tribute. They came back on stage and played it immediately.

Keith Jarrett wrote all the music for a tour of Japan on the plane there. That became the album "Personal Mountains"[2]. Apparently he literally had all the meal trays around him open with scores on them and was scribbling away the whole way.

[1] One of the all-time classic jazz ballads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWWO_VcdnHY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8rokRx3lnY

whstl8 months ago

True. I know a couple people who work with soundtracks professionally for TV, and the crazy thing is that "writing songs fast" is a totally different skill in itself, so it's not enough to be an amazing player with decades of experience, or even an amazing songwriter, it's a different superpower that impresses other musicians too.

Those super-fast soundtrack/jingle composers, session musicians and professional songwriters have this "little bag of tricks" in their heads that they use to move fast and iterate. They know intricacies of the styles they work with, like chord progressions, rhythms, song structures, arrangement conventions and cliche lines. Then, the chord progression often "suggests" a melody (meaning: some notes sound more natural over different chords), and melodies often also "suggests" some lyrics. And they also know the rules well enough to be able to break them.

Naturally, to make something "beautiful" takes more than "speed" and "familiarity with the genre". But it is really cool to see people able to do things fast. I wonder if we could apply this to coding... I guess it's not too different from people able to do game jams, or hackatons.

+1
jimmydddd8 months ago
jjeaff8 months ago

Well, as the saying goes, it took 4 hours, plus a lifetime of study and practice.

stavros8 months ago

This is the most beautiful comment I've ever read. Well done, Pavel!

CrazyCatDog8 months ago

1) Clear your evening. 2) Do not Google, but rather jump straight to your favorite media platform, and locate a 2012 film named: “searching for sugar man.” 3) Watch alone because it’s impossible to watch without crying tears of joy

xattt8 months ago

It’s survivor bias at play. There would be a million other tracks written and released with the same time constraints that no one heard off.

magicalist8 months ago

> It’s survivor bias at play

What is the "it" in this sentence referring to? No one made any claims to refute.

The GP just asked you to imagine the feeling of being in that situation.

QuercusMax8 months ago

They're planning to release it as a single!

asadalt8 months ago

I once was listening to a song in a cafe in Pakistan and couldn't find it. Me and friends did:

- Shazam a few times

- Ask the restaurant folks if they can look at some screen to get us the name, apparently it was on a screenless mp3 player

- I recorded a sample of it

- I tried all fingerprinting services apart from Shazam

- Posted on a few subreddits, found the base song, a daft punk song but not exact one

- I looked up all remixes all over internet, no luck

- Finally someone found the exact soundcloud link, apparently it was a remix with no mention of daft punk anywhere

Andrex8 months ago

There was a remix of a Backstreet Boys song at a club that completely changed my opinion of the band (along with a mix of various other factors...) I recorded it and have scoured YouTube constantly, but no luck so far.

crtasm8 months ago
Andrex8 months ago

https://photos.app.goo.gl/BACNK6rbJioVWT1DA

Hard to hear for about 10-20 seconds but it's I Want It That Way. There's remixes that are kiiiiind of similar but nothing that's exactly the same, I've found.

+1
crtasm8 months ago
poglet8 months ago

Many songs that I liked on Soundcloud go missing so consider saving it.

leblancfg8 months ago

Well do share! lol

mikub8 months ago

This reminds me of how much I miss watching X-Files back in the days. Such a good show.

codexb8 months ago

I fondly remember getting Little Caesars pizza every Friday after soccer practice and coming home to stay up late with my dad and watch the new X-Files. The 90's truly were the best decade.

UberFly8 months ago

It's funny how these kind of -maybe mundane at the time- things really are the most important things.

mrexroad8 months ago

Agree. Friday night X-Files was is such a great memory. My 90’s-geek-self (and current) especially loved any episode with the Lone Gunmen — such a different era of hacker culture. On the opposite end of the spectrum, while I enjoyed watching SeaQuest (s1 at least) on Sunday nights, I mostly remember the post-episode dread as the weekend was over and it was time to get ready for Monday.

tomcam8 months ago

That’s a lovely reminiscence. It’s a beautiful memory to have.

AntoniusBlock8 months ago

If you're in the UK, all X-File episodes are available to stream for free on 4OD. I'm re-watching it too, but I'm so busy I can only do 1 episode every few days.

mikub8 months ago

That's almost how it was back then, one episode per week. ;) I haven't done a complete rewatch but from time to time I just watch some of my favorite episodes like, "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas", "Field Trip", "Quagmire" to just name a few of them.

mindslight8 months ago

If you've got an Internet connection, all the X-files episodes are available for download through torrents.

zoky8 months ago

Unfortunately, I do not have an Internet connection…

circularfoyers8 months ago

The same on SBS OnDemand, for anyone in Australia.

c23gooey8 months ago

Thank you for this.

tomduncalf8 months ago

There goes my weekend lol. Thanks! Are they the remastered versions? I was quite impressed by how good they looked on the whole.

mwaitjmp8 months ago

It’s quite impressive how good xfiles looks today when you compare it to other shows around the same period.

Space above and beyond in comparison looks pretty terrible from what I have seen. It’s not even wide screen.

I think X files was shot on film perhaps?

I’m not sure if what we have now on say Disney plus for example is a remastered version but certainly it holds up very well.

tomduncalf8 months ago

Yeah I read up on this a bit as I was very impressed by the quality. It was shot on widescreen film so they could just rescan (if that’s the term?) the film at widescreen HD resolution. I think they had to retouch or adjust the crop in some scenes because there was stuff off to the side which you weren’t meant to see, which was out of the 4:3 area but inside the 16:9 area.

Some of the special FX shots look bad because they were digital and so they’ve just had to upscale them, but overall I was really impressed too. It’s nice because it lets you enjoy it all over again without being distracted by how “bad” it looks on modern TVs

hnthrowaway03288 months ago

Still a good one. I watched it once few years. I'll probably watch it again this year during Christmas. When my son grows up I'll introduce it to him too. I'm not sure what is the appropriate age but I guess 12 is OK? Some of the scenes are definitely 18+ though, I think.

mikub8 months ago

Just don't let him watch the episode called "Home", some other episodes could also be to early at 12, but most should be ok.

hnthrowaway03288 months ago

Oh yeah, now that you reminded me, there are a few episodes that has sort of viewer discretion warning at the beginning.

I'll tell $wifie that I'll have to re-watch the whole X-Files this month to figure out which episodes my son should avoid when he is 12 (that is around 9 years from now). This definitely counts as parenting work.

theIV8 months ago

Yup. For better or worse, "Home" _almost always_ gets a "Jump to Next Episode."

cm21878 months ago

I loved as a teenager but its looks silly now, like a lot of teenager movies. With the exception of the "X-cops" episode which is a little gem.

RajT888 months ago

It has aged better than most other shows from the era. IMO of course.

"Harsh Realm" (another Chris Carter show) may yet become relevant again though.

"The Lone Gunmen" as the sillier cousin of X-Files is as charming as ever.

mavhc8 months ago

Millennium is still the best spin off, and the episode parodying Scientology is still amazing

sgt8 months ago

The Lone Gunmen!

cies8 months ago

Makes me think of once I was in bed listening to a house mix and suddenly I heard a remix of a track I've been wanting to re-listen since my child hood. No text, just melody. I jumped out, got on the piano and rev-engineered the melody.

Now there are search engines for melodies, I think I used this one:

https://www.musipedia.org/js_piano.html

First 5 hits were not the track (knowing how to read score helps here), but the sixth: bleam!

The track was "Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jElCDsfptVU

tomduncalf8 months ago

There was a trance mix of this in the 90s that charted in the UK: Watergate - Heart of Asia, in case it’s that. You could also check out whosampled.com, that shows who sampled or covered a song.

toasterlovin8 months ago

Huh, I also recognize that tune from a dj set. Going out on a limb here, but is the one you have in mind The Outrunners at Razzmatazz? It would have been on the VALERIE blog in 2009ish. Here's a link:

https://www.mixcloud.com/pierre-de-la-touche/the-outrunners-...

cies8 months ago

Nah, different one. I prefer yours :)

sleepybrett8 months ago

Simply one of the best pieces of soundtrack music ever.

RileyJames8 months ago

Except.

And I’ll never know. Because X has so severely broken the UX of their product I have no idea how to find out. Or if there even is anything beyond that.

Twitter is becoming a link I don’t bother clicking anymore…

TaylorAlexander8 months ago

One of the people involved published this nice blog post: https://www.joneshouseband.com/about-2

croes8 months ago

Replace twitter.com by nitter.net

dmux8 months ago

Coincidentally there’s another song in an x-files episode that has been sought out over the years. In that case though, it’s a rendition by the original performers that seems to have never been made public: https://www.reddit.com/r/XFiles/comments/1zthzq/can_we_pleas...

mwcremer8 months ago

Somewhere I saw a clip of David Duchovny revealing the never-before-heard lyrics of the X-Files theme song:

  The X-Files is a show
      With music by Mark Snow
  The X-Files is a show
      With music by Mark Snow
  ...
pilsetnieks8 months ago

I wonder who's the author, and if they did a Rodenberry on the theme (Rodenberry, in addition to everything else, was the author of lyrics for the Star Trek theme. Despite them never being used, he made a tidy sum in royalties.)

tenacious_tuna8 months ago

the star trek theme has lyrics? beyond the voiceover by the captain?

krapp8 months ago

It was written with lyrics that were never used[0].

[0]https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28895/star-trek-theme-so...

iambateman8 months ago

This makes me miss the ReplyAll podcast. They were the best at tracking down obscurities like this and telling a fun story about them.

ParacelsusOfEgg8 months ago

PJ Vogt has a new podcast called Search Engine that is worth a try.

pilsetnieks8 months ago

I remember that episode! https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx

I was listening to it on a bus and screaming inside because I had that mp3 sitting in my library, obtained years and years ago through questionable means, and had listened to it quite a lot.

Even Olson - So Much Better (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qTESaoSU_8), for the record.

stickfigure8 months ago

Sounds like you would enjoy this podcast, if you haven't listened already:

https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/

A whole 8-part podcast series about the origin of the Scorpions song "Wind of Change". But really a vehicle for lots of interesting cold war history.

cm21878 months ago

Talking about music Shazam fails to identify, I have a bee in my bonnet about a piece of violin that I found in several trailers [1] [2]. Sounds like Ray Davies but can't find the tune anywhere.

[1] https://youtu.be/md9M1KPP9no?t=82

[2] https://youtu.be/R4OIZJljMWA?t=3

JDW10238 months ago

The song appears to be Soiree by Helen Jane Long.The song is recognized by youtube on the second youtube video in the description.

https://us.audionetwork.com/browse/m/track/soiree_5303

cm21878 months ago

Well, thank you, you made me discover an alternative to shazam! I never thought of looking into the description of a youtube video...

qingcharles8 months ago

Google Assistant is better these days, in my experiments.

388 months ago

I checked the whole thread but don't see a link to the actual song. did it actually get posted yet? and I don't mean a cam of someones TV or something. as others said, logged out Twitter is garbage.

upon_drumhead8 months ago

Not yet.

> Due to popular demand, writers Dan Marfisi & Glenn Jordan are working to release the song as a single.

https://www.joneshouseband.com/about-2

ksherlock8 months ago

Dan Marfisi/Glenn Jordan found the song on a CD but it has not yet been made available anywhere.

ChrisArchitect7 months ago

Update: December 13, 2023

Came back to this thread as had forgotten to look up if had all come together! Sure enough:

RELEASED after 25 years

Staring At The Stars - Dan Marfisi and Glenn Jordan (The X-Files)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml_mAoOZEAM

And here's a further article and interview on NPR that kind of wraps it all up:

People have been searching for this song from 'The X-Files' for 25 years. Until now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38650446

block_dagger8 months ago

Lyrics: "have waited for a light-year." What a long time! Wait.

sixothree8 months ago

It's just a few parsecs.

anonymouskimmer8 months ago

An eternity. https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.htm...

: photons don't experience any time at all.

Edit: I think it's appropriate as the lyrics start "in my memory you are moonlight, starlight". Postulating that the subject of the song is light makes the "waited for a light year" more of an "I would walk 500 miles" type of song lyric.

bmacho8 months ago

> The full song will drop Friday, Dec., 7. Check back for it!

https://www.joneshouseband.com/

stavros8 months ago

"Friday"?

wingworks8 months ago

It is Friday, but I guess not in my timezone (NZ) :P

stavros8 months ago

Friday is the 8th. The 7th is Thursday.

+1
imp0cat8 months ago
ComputerGuru8 months ago

So I used to Shazam songs from shows all the time, but Shazam “expanded” a few years back to being able to identify the episode of a tv show from a sample and that killed Shazam for me because it would return the episode and show I already knew I was watching instead of the song playing in the background of the dialog I was sampling.

ChrisArchitect8 months ago

Noticed this one a few days ago randomly as it was developing and as an old X-Phile it intrigued a bit ... particularly because it actually was going somewhere very fast after years of people pondering about it. (even had me searching some old usenet archives for clues)

TL;DR:

A song that appeared in a country bar scene in an X-Files episode (the 25th anniversary of the first airing of said episode in 1998!) has been a mystery for years. Allured by its on-topic country lyrics etc, many have wondered for years. After this thread, the music production guy and some others have come out of the woodwork and are working on finding the lost song which was produced/played custom for the show. A cue file has been found and the music guy thinks he might have a cd backup of it somewhere (which requires more help because he doesn't have a cd player to play it apparently!). They are going to work on a public release of the song if it comes together.

drexlspivey8 months ago

I’ve been on a similar rabbit hole looking for a proper release of this song https://youtu.be/Oom_s1mu-Ks from the movie The Funeral

I found out that it was written by Abel Ferrara (the director of the movie) but no proper recording that I could find

cm21878 months ago

That's an incredible scene. I think it's based on St James Infirmary.

erickhill8 months ago

That was one of the most interesting and captivating rabbit holes I've read in a long time.

wingworks8 months ago

Kinda similar, I've been forever looking for this classical song played at the end of Stargate Atlantis S05E03 https://youtube.com/watch?v=ostmot-zVDs

I think I read somewhere the guy died who made the song (and was going to release it), but probably lost forever now :( https://forum.gateworld.net/stargate-atlantis/episodes/seaso...

ChocMontePy8 months ago

The full song finally got released today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml_mAoOZEAM

cwmma8 months ago
DashAnimal8 months ago

That was a really enjoyable thread, and what a great resolution. Not really my type of music but I'll ha e to give the song a listen in a couple of days when it becomes available.

kaycebasques8 months ago

This thread inspired me to watch an X-Files episode last night. I had to search for what episode to watch because I remember them getting pretty scary and creepy, which I don't want right now. I found a mild and comical one that was perfect: Jose Chung's "From Outer Space", season 3, ep. 20

mproud8 months ago

The rightful conclusion will be when someone can watch the X-Files episode, query Shazam, and it returns the song!

system28 months ago

Why do people use twitter as a blog post platform? Why can't she write a blog post and share it on twitter?

Apocryphon8 months ago

This is one of the actual great use cases for Twitter, where 1) bite sized statements are easy to spread and be digested, and 2) can attract real-time contributions from other users (who the original author can then share), 3) can instantly spawn separate subthreads not far removed from the original discussion. (The tweet by Michelle St Claire about the song likely being specifically composed for shows inspired a whole different conversation about production music libraries.)

If this was posted on a blog it would be a whole series of posts or perhaps edits to the same otherwise static blog article. Not to mention this is also not an instance of someone writing long-form tweets in an interminable thread, i.e. the classic "why is this not a blog post?" classic anti-use case.

rhuru8 months ago

There is another track in X files which they never officially released by I absolutely love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxMB5NBRJEc

csours8 months ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Roblox Oof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twDETh6QaI

at_a_remove8 months ago

I love this kind of thing. A lot of times I will have to write a composer or bother a sound engineer for something uber-rare, something that was never officially released. Many of them are only too happy to share.

VeejayRampay8 months ago

this reminds me of that one really in-depth article that I read about git about 10 years ago, it put in parallel the different git commands, the effects it had on the data structures stored on disk (i.e. .git internals) and the associated DAG operations

it was absolutely beautifully done and I've been looking for it ever since, but I am now afraid of the fact that it was only a composite of several other articles recreated by my brain from different blog posts, articles and various pieces

micromacrofoot8 months ago

I'm glad they figured it out, the song was way too on the nose to be a random library track. I'm surprised people were saying that after hearing the lyrics.

Apocryphon8 months ago

Finally, a case where the platform's rebrand makes sense.

sleepybrett8 months ago

It's always nice to see a 'The internet is still awesome sometimes' type story. But also makes me very sad at the state of twitter. I don't think I see a single person that contributes positively in this thread that has a blue checkmark. Meaning they are in the group people that elon has and will continue to alienate by his current drive for 'pay me or else fuck you too'.

HumblyTossed8 months ago

So... if they forgot about it, are they not making anything at all off of it from the X-Files? That seems so wrong.

steverit8 months ago

I would think they have been getting royalties on episode reruns, since they were tracked down via a cue sheet, which has their names on it. Cue sheet is used by performing rights organizations to pay out royalties to performers. Given the story of the track's composition ("we need a song, you have four hours") my guess is that these folks have produced a large number of songs over the past 30 years that earn relatively small royalties per track. Add on top of that there are multiple tracks called "X-Files" just in this episode and I'd further guess there are plenty of songs that the musicians are getting paid for that they have forgotten over the years!

encoderer8 months ago

Works for hire.

narag8 months ago

Late to the Shazam show, had not heard of it. Will it work with me playing a melody on the piano or does it need the original record?

I have this uplifting jazzy song in my head that was used for the basketball intro in Spain a very long time ago. It sounded much like a Sousa march played by an electric jazz band. Tried all kind of tricks to find it, but no luck so far.

tomduncalf8 months ago

It needs the original record, or something close to it (it can recognise some live versions at a different speed, maybe cover versions). The Google app on iOS or android has a thing where you can hum a melody so that might be better.

mike_hock8 months ago

You bastards. Now I've had the song stuck in my head since yesterday.

zzzbra8 months ago

best of the internet

1970-01-018 months ago

For the next exercise, please find the original moon landing tapes.

krapp8 months ago

Has anyone asked the estate of Stanley Kubrick?

HumblyTossed8 months ago

The ones where we actually did land on the moon?

adastra228 months ago

Yes, the original video recording of the moon landing has been lost. It was broadcast live, but all we have is the grainy, shitty, washed out recording of the national news you see shown everywhere. The actual signal from the moon, which people at Mission Control would have seen, had a FAR better resolution and contrast.

It was recorded with basically the best camera they could send, and digitized and returned to earth with a proprietary signal format invented just for this purpose, to ensure the highest possible resolution and accuracy as 1969 tech could provide. But because it was proprietary, for the media event they piped the high resolution imagery into a crummy TV somewhere in Houston, and pointed a run of the mill TV production camera at this little TV screen, as a low tech conversion just for that night. Like a bootleg movie video.

Unfortunately the primary recording was accidentally destroyed, and the backups are missing. All we have now is that shitty TV camera recording of a TV screen with terrible contrast where you can barely see anything.

It is accurate in that for the billion people watching live, this grainy low contrast video is what they correctly remember seeing. That was the moon landing experience for nearly everyone on earth. But those in Mission Control DID have a nice crisp view, and the rest of us may never get to experience that :(

opello8 months ago

In my fever dream version of reality the success of something like "For All Mankind" would present an opportunity to fund searching for this footage.

+1
zaptrem8 months ago
MostlyStable8 months ago

While obviously the true original would be better, I wonder how closely modern upscaling/de-noising/etc (possibly with AI assistance?) would approximate the lost footage.

hnthrowaway03288 months ago

How did they lose that? Sigh...

+1
adastra228 months ago
giantrobot8 months ago

Big reel to reel data tapes didn't have the best labeling and could be stored in cans that might not match the spindle's label. I could imagine it pretty easy for a tape to be stored in a mismatched can and then get sent off to a storage area. The "right" can with the wrong spindle ends up in the archive while the "wrong" can gets sent off to a warehouse or reused or whatever. Apollo was a huge project with a lot of people. All it takes is one person too busy to notice they put a tape in the wrong can.

ethbr18 months ago

The ones that tried to convince you we didn't land on the moon and faked the tapes, despite people in the know being well aware that the "fake tapes" were actually produced on the moon as part of Operation Nonstop Night.

Lone Gunmen forever.

AnotherGoodName8 months ago

This link doesn't really work for anyone without a twitter account fwiw. We just see a single message. I think the preferred way to share twitter content these days is to screenshot the full thread. Or just accept that it's not really shareable and move on.

madars8 months ago
wharvle8 months ago

It’s frustrating because some of Musk’s first moves were to make logged-out Twitter a ton better, but then a while ago he reversed course hard and made it entirely unusable. It’s the worst it’s ever been, I’m not employing “unusable” flippantly, it’s in fact almost pointless to follow a Twitter link while logged out now.

Yeah, in my circle if people want to share Twitter stuff, they’ve taken to using screenshots.

readams8 months ago

The worst part is that it's not apparent _why_ the link sucks. If they would at least have a message "Log in to view the rest of the thread" it would be much better. But I have clicked around in futility several times before to try to find where the rest of it is.

partiallypro8 months ago

I've stopped sharing Twitter links at this point and just send screenshots to people. I can never know if they have a Twitter account. He supposedly did this to stop "bots."

zerocrates8 months ago

My suspicion has been that the well-publicized removal of many servers that used to be part of Twitter's infra had a negative performance impact, and the series of changes to how anonymous users and/or tweet embeds worked are a band-aid on that.

For an anonymous viewer, they still don't show you the rest of a thread a tweet is in, or even any indication of the fact that there is a thread that you're not seeing. This doesn't even make sense as a nudge to join Twitter, so load reduction feels like the most likely reason to me.

butlike8 months ago

If you want to watch the presidential debate, you'll need to log in to Twxtter, is the gut check I'm getting with the push to streaming, but not adding clips.

You can go from there depending on how optimistic/pessimistic you want to be, but ultimately I do feel like I can see that being the path forward foe Twxtter.

xupybd8 months ago

I think it is a move to try and force people to sign up.

retox8 months ago

And then when you do your account gets locked immediately for 'suspicious activity' and they ask for phone details and/or photo ID. X is going to be WeChat with payments etc, they need real people's details.

Teever8 months ago

What if we talked about the X-files in a post about the X-files, and talked about Elon Musk... Anywhere else?

wharvle8 months ago

When sufficiently broken links hit the main page, the brokenness is gonna be part of the discussion. Whatever the intentions of HN, it’s always the case, even for ones that are broken for boring and predictable paywall reasons rather than slightly-more-interesting walling-off-the-“town square” reasons.

Besides… “The Twitter Files”… Twitter renamed X… yep, that checks out, still on topic.

Nthringas8 months ago

the public (open?) internet is dying

i wonder if there are any nuances between public and open

bongodongobob8 months ago

I've never used Twitter in my life. Twitter is not "the internet" nor is it essential in any way. Get a hold of yourself.

black_puppydog8 months ago

It used to be part of the internet. As in, people publishing stuff there weren't isolated, I could send you a link and you'd "just read it" as it were. This is increasingly untrue. Just like with facebook and the others, I might add.

In the end, I think Jake Applebaum was right: the established social media are the real darknet. Stuff that's posted there eventually gets cut off for fun^Wprofit and dies a silent death...

+1
jra_samba8 months ago
jhbadger8 months ago

In the same way that sugared cereals used to be advertised as "part of this complete breakfast!" showing it next to fruit, eggs, toast, etc. that made a perfectly good breakfast without the cereal.

anonymouskimmer8 months ago

Commercial internet content providers have become more closed to those not logged in over the years. Twitter is just the latest instance.

MisterTea8 months ago

No the public internet is doing just fine. I can still send packets to where ever. However, the machines connected to it aren't playing nice with each other anymore.

anonymouskimmer8 months ago

You're purposefully misinterpreting the contextual meaning of "internet" as used by GP.

naremu8 months ago

The "town square" in action.

gorbachev8 months ago

Can we just automatically replace twitter links with nitter links here? Please.

drcongo8 months ago

It's free speech.