I was given a very special gift on Thursday, a copy of Ash 1977. That on its own is enough to make me happy, but it wasn’t just any copy, this one is from the first 50,000 CD pressings and so has two hidden tracks (Jack Names The Planets and Don’t Know) in the pregap before track one.

Like most people these days I only listen to music on my computer, using iTunes, which can’t see the hidden tracks. Neither could my DVD player. I had started looking around for an old CD player, but then I found X Lossless Decoder.

X Lossless Decoder is, as the name suggests, a lossless audio decoder and CD ripper for Mac OS X, much like Exact Audio Copy on Windows. Crucially, it also supports reading audio information from the pregap. As you can see in the screenshot, it found the long pregap before track one without a problem.

It worked perfectly. I now have a set of bit perfect WAVs ready for conversion to AAC, importing into iTunes and putting on my iPhone. I am very happy indeed.

It’s not often I make a donation to an open source project, but I did this time. X Lossless Decoder has made my week. Well, X Lossless Decoder and the person who gave me the CD