Richard David James (Aphex Twin) often hides things in his records; there’s even a piece of a game for the ZX Spectrum in the Richard D. James Album (I’ll talk about it again, it’s peculiar). But in the EP 2 Remixes By AFX, there’s an image encoded in SSTV.
Instead of repeating all the previous articles each time, I’ll refer you to the dedicated page, which explains what I do with vinyl records and lists all the pages containing programs, explanations, etc.
SSTV (Slow Scan Television) is a technique used to transfer analog images slowly over channels with low bandwidth. I talked about it a while ago, because people from the ISS occasionally send images of this type. And in the EP, the track Bonus High Frequency Sounds is an SSTV image. It exists on the CD (which I bought) but also on various vinyl variants. Someone had already decoded the image on this page.
Decoding the image was quite simple: I used the program I had already used on iPad in 2015. It’s a paid app (3.5€) but works on a Mac M1 directly. After encoding the track from the CD, I just looped it through an external sound card to send the sound into the input. Technically, you can probably even do it with software that loops the output to the input internally. And after about two minutes of waiting (it’s slow scan), you get this image in 320 x 256 (the encoding is a classic in Europe, the Martin M1). I significantly reduced the volume in the video.
The image
The top of the image indicates MultiMode by N3JLY (the name of the program used to encode the image). Next, the text is as follows, but it’s frankly hard to read, and there are alphanumeric characters in the text. I’ve bolded what I’m not certain about. The part about the programs is quite illegible as a result.
This is the first release on Rich*ard/tom and grants label.
the first side is a remix of boxe?nergy by dj pierre and the other is a remix of flowc$oma by STATE 808.
I used the following programs to m%ake this music:
???
respeckt to K-rok for the vocal snatch
By the way, this isn’t the only CD with an SSTV image; we’ll talk about it again.
