Likes: 
Faceplams: ^ But how do we explain these exclusive vocal takes of “Only”?
Just tickles my balls!
^ But how do we explain these exclusive vocal takes of “Only”?
Administrator
So, I had done this whole analysis of the timing of the purchase of the disc and the upload of the files. But in light of the Cages stuff above, it's almost not worth it to type it up. So I'll try to summarize briefly. The auction ended at Jan. 24, 12:13:57pm PST. The files were uploaded on Jan. 28, 11:54:10 AM PST. That's less than 4 days (over a weekend) for payment, shipping, receiving, and upload.
I looked at Amoeba's eBay auctions, and they specify a 4 day handling period. Not exactly the sign of a seller who's going to dash off your package the same day that the buyer pays for it. And it has to go in the mail because Amoeba says they don't offer local pickup for the auctions. Amoeba's auctions say that they ship via Media Mail from San Francisco. On the receiving side, I don't know about you, but I've never lived at a residential place that received mail before noon. So, the buyer would have had to have received on Jan. 27, or a morning delivery on Jan 28, that he was at home to receive and then immediately upload. And to receive a Media Mail package on the 27th (or maybe the 28th) which was mailed on Jan. 24 or 25? Well, that probably would have been possible only for a buyer that also lived in San Fran.
So, between the slow specified handling time, the slow Media Mail shipping method, and the time of day it was uploaded, I find it mostly improbable that someone could have received it and uploaded a rip within the known time frame.
Edit: Upon reflection, it's possible that for a $1200 item, Amoeba shipped it something like Priority Mail or Fedex, rather than Media Mail. Still, they would have had to mail it out Friday afternoon, just hours after the auction end, for it to arrive by Monday or Tuesday morning, so I still find it quite unlikely.
Administrator
I don't know. I haven't looked at that. At all, actually, so I can't comment. The bullshittiness of Cages is enough for me to throw the baby out with the bathwater.Originally Posted by Erneuert
That said, I'd like Leviathant to take a look at Cages again, compared to my Cages and such, and see if he still sees the solo piano thing. I don't hear any difference there. I suspect that the time stretching may be interfering with the analysis. That may be the case with Only too.
God is an American
I'm going to try and play along, too, once I finish editing this audiobook.
Banned
If we're going to speculate on the legitimacy of this thing, I'll throw this out there for consideration then, too:
It was Trent himself who uploaded it to Archive.
Hell, maybe he even caught wind up the auction, threw up a huge amount that he knew no one would likely even approach, and took the auction for himself. He lives in LA; isn't that where the Amoeba Records store is where this shipped out of?
This was also right around the time that Watchmen 1: Sons of Pale Horse vinyl with Trent and Atticus's signatures popped up in that same store, if I'm not mistaken. Coincidence? Maybe he stopped by in person to pick the CD-R up personally and left the Watchmen vinyl with them as a thank you/easter egg..
It would not be unlike Trent at all to upload the contents of the CD-R anonymously and then just allow it to be discovered naturally. He knows his fanbase is smarter than most and will find these kinds of things eventually. It makes ZERO sense for some random person to be monitoring the auction, have all of the necessary resources in hand to create a super-clever clone, put all that time and effort into making a clone and then just plop it out on Archive with nary a hint or a clue to the fanbase that it was there. Some troll is really going to go through all that in the hopes that we'll one day stumble upon it and be completely duped? That defies any reasonable or coherent logic..
This Archive upload has Trent's fingerprints all over it. He found clever ways to get us the Closure DVD and the shelved WITW score, not to mention a sprawling ARG that has his fans still looking for clues to such things in practically every release he puts out..
If we're going to theorize on the origins of Tentative Sequence, then that's my ultra-conspiratorial hot take..
God is an American
Well, we all know how much he loves putting unmastered unfinished versions of his work out there.
Banned
Dude just released 90 odd minutes of 1930s orchestra music with his name attached to it. Do you really think he gives a rip what we think about five works in progress from a 15 year old album? Or anything else we theorize about here?
It would be hilarious if he were to actually read this stuff and drop in like "You people are unreal. But here are those Bad Witch instrumentals you seem to want so bad, in reward of your diligence and persistence.."
Administrator
I don't think it's Trent that put it on archive.org. I'm not going to say I'm 100% certain (ever again, lol), but I'll just say that doesn't really fit with how he's done things before.
Why go to mono after 13 seconds of stereo intro on Cages? My guess is that it's the same reason Help Me I Am In Hell's video was a black screen up until the Broken DVD found its way online.
Regarding the timing in relation to the Amoeba eBay auction - do we know for sure that the disc Amoeba was selling is the same one reviewed in "Kerrang!" in February 2005? Who else received copies of this five-song sampler? When the auction went live, at least one other person on Facebook was reminded of a copy of something similar they'd had - I'm not saying it's likely, but it's entirely possible that as word got out about this sampler, someone else who had a copy uploaded it to archive.org."I know exactly how it leaked because we made a few copies, and each one had a glitch in a different spot," Reznor said. "And I'm sure the one that leaked I gave to Gibby Haynes."
Alternatively, as mentioned above, for $1200, I'd either get fast shipping, or - if I lived in or near Los Angeles, I'd arrange for a local pickup to further reduce risk of damage or loss in transit.
Alright, I'm gonna go over to my desktop and make some audio files for Soundcloud.
Administrator
Okay, here's what I've put on Soundcloud.
For the "Cages" clips, I start out with "Cages" and then fade "Right Where It Belongs" in, so you can hear the difference between a full-spectrum clip, and a phase-canceled clip.
In each of these, what you're hearing is the difference between two clips when you invert the phase of one set of waves and mix it against the other set. In the case of "Every Day Is Exactly The Same" you get a perfect cancellation - silence - because it's mathematically the same as what's on that promo CD. You can search Google for more on the concept, here's one page that kinda touches on it.
If you click through to Soundcloud, you should see that I've added notes to the bits that stood out to me.
Because of the time differences, it's pretty challenging to get a perfect phase alignment. For example, I set the album version of Getting Smaller to 0.998801 playback speed, and it's still not quite right, but it was close enough that I could get a fairly long sweep where it cancels out pretty well.
The reason you can still hear most of the track quietly, even when the bigger differences pop out, is not only because the waves aren't perfectly aligned, but because the "Tentative" tracks have different EQ & dynamics from the album version.
But that doesn't account for what I feel are clear differences between the album versions and the archive.org versions:
Getting Smaller: Snares are dubbed in throughout the song, and vocal effects have longer tails - presumably both were added in the album version.
Only: on the archive.org version, vocals aren't as closely aligned to the beat, aren't effected, and I've noted a "Hngh" kinda sound that's not in the multitracks or the album version.
Cages: There's a point right after "Is that all you want it to be" where my phase-cancellation indicated a big change. At first I thought it was an EQ change, but instead the waveform is a little bit out of alignment. If I shift the track a little bit, it cancels out again. So, this must have been a point where this part of the track was pasted in. The next thing I noticed, which I hadn't picked up on before - but there sounds like there's a reverb tail that's not in one of the mixes. The next thing I hear is a piano that's not in one of the mixes.
Anyway - that's my case.
The Devil is in my kiss.
Oh my. Remind me to install a voice recorder in my apartment. If I ever go missing, it will hopefully end up on ETS and you guys will solve what ditch I'm buried in before the cops even open a case file.
Just tickles my balls!
^ That’s why the Year Zero ARG got solved so fast.
Administrator
Yes, it's the same, and you're right, there could be more copies out there. What you suggest is unlikely, but a possibility I hadn't considered. However, why use the eBay images then, cropped to look not like the eBay images? Why wait until after the auction is ended to post it?
As I mentioned, it was in San Francisco, not LA, and local pickup is not an option.
Administrator
It's late, so I'm just going to write a quick note. I took a look at the Only multitracks for the first time tonight. I haven't gone through them entirely, but I think you may not be looking at the full multitracks, Leviathant. Per Trent's note from the website, only the ProTools version includes the following:
"I've also included some alternate parts and takes (in playlists) that were not included in the final version for you to experiment with."
So, if you don't have that, you can download that from here: https://archive.org/download/NineInc...nlyMultitracks
I found the extra "Hnh" grunt in the Lead_02.aif file. The whole rest of that file is a different vocal take than what was on the album version and accounts for the rest of the different vocal takes you noticed. It also includes the extra lyrics at the end of the song ("Is this really all there is"). Other differences you noticed could be due to those "alternate parts and takes" in other files that Trent included. I haven't gone through all the files to try to identify them, but I imagine they're there.
As some people mentioned a couple times in this thread, I think, the vocal misalignment is a characteristic of the multitracks. I'm not sure if it was provided by Trent that way, or if it happened in one of the assemblies that some people did (the "converted" ones listed at the above archive.org link were all assembled by nympholept).
Administrator
All this research and you guys still can't crack A Warm Place sample.
I am disappoint
Administrator
Oh nice - I had grabbed the multitracks off nindestruct.com, but I remember thinking that the ProTools session was more involved than what was in the zip I received. I feel like a bit of a knob for not checking archive.org for the original download (cheers nympholept, there's a name I feel like I haven't seen in ages). I remembered that the ProTools session had the extra lyrics.
So here's my latest take:
Only: When I mix Lead_01, Lead_02, and Only (Instrumental), invert their phase, and mix against what's on Archive.org, it almost perfectly cancels out, leaving compression artifacts that clock in at about -30db. There are effected vocals that pop in and out, but I expect they're available in the other multitrack vocal files and I'm not going to chase them down. Which file has the greater fidelity? The FLAC from archive.org looks full fidelity when I take it into a spectrum analyzer.
Having said that, my Instrumental copy of Only is an MP3, but I believe that instrumental was only available via Apple Music. Was there ever a lossless copy of the Only instrumental? The other tracks from the ProTools session do not phase-cancel with the archive.org version the way the vocals do, so I don't think it was a case of normalling the faders and printing a stereo version from the remix files.
If there's a lossless instrumental copy of Only out there, I think that would put this to bed for me.
Having not considered the instrumental files in my last analysis, I dropped them into the other tracks just to see what turned up.
Getting Smaller: Theinstrumental version doesn't have the snare dubs that are in the archive.org version. They could have been dubbed in, but they're so simultaneously random and specific that I would think it would take a very long time to do right. It's not just one-off hits, sometimes it's fills. Still - not outside the realm of the possible for a determined faker. EQ on the guitars at the beginning is a little different between the instrumental version and the Archive.org version. None of the three (CD, Archive, instrumental) versions perfectly phase-cancel. When I compare Instrumental against Archive, I get snare hits. When I compare Instrumental to CD, I get different snare hits. When I compare CD to Archive, I get different snare hits. I think this suggests that all three are different prints of a session that is running a drumming plugin with 'humanize' enabled. This seems like a strong argument for the archive.org version to be the real deal, and would explain why it's seemingly random snares that pop out.
Cages/RWIB: Dropped the instrumental in there and "Cages" still has an extra piano by comparison. I still think that the reverb tails are different between RWIB and "Cages". What's interesting when comparing the instrumental against the archive.org version is that the weird cut/paste error (very evident when comparing to the CD version) exists in the instrumental as well. In other words, in order to get this to match as well as it does, you'd have to overlay the vocals on the instrumental version - not just drop in the album version. Once you've dropped the vocals in, you'd have to dub in that piano. As with Cages, none of the versions I have exactly phase-cancel.
And since I was doing spectral analysis, I revisited EDEITS.
Every Day Is Exactly The Same: Given that I haven't been getting perfect cancellation between these other tracks, but EDEITS went perfectly silent, I went and ripped my CD copy to compare, and when I compared the CD rip to the archive.org copy, the archive version is sourced from a lossy version. There's been dithering to reintroduce high frequency noise, but it doesn't have the details that my CD has. This eliminates the idea that EDEITS on the Euro promo is from the same direct source as what's on archive.org.
In Summary:
Two of the tracks largely phase cancel with other material out there - the remaining difference is the result of a lossy source. In "Only", the lossy source is the existing material (the instrumental), and in EDIETS the lossy source is the archive.org material (the promo CD is lossless). Two of the tracks (Cages & Getting Smaller) have peculiar, though not particularly interesting, differences. For Getting Smaller, I found that the instrumental, album, and archive versions all have slightly different snare velocity patterns from each other. Cages has the same audio glitch as the Instrumental of Right Where It Belongs, but between the album version, the instrumental version, and the archive version, only the archive version has the added piano. The reverb tail standing out between mixes could also be a result of doing separate renders using a plugin.
I need a cooler hobby.
Memb, Member, The Membest
Interesting. I dug out a 1-track Only CD that's got a sliiiightly longer fadeout than album mix. Just sent a rip to Leviathant to check, because no proper software on my PC at the moment. Would like to hear back if it's simply released version or anything else
RA-MEN ROPPAI
In case it helps in any way, here's the "original" Apple Music M4A for "Only":
https://mega.nz/file/CsZj1Y6J#Fmu8yO...yIiubFicDqcopE
Stubby Member
Sorry for creating that confusion. Looks like I need to take some time to seek out any original versions I can find and update the site.
Administrator
No, there wasn't a lossless. As Jon mentioned above, it was a 256 Kbps AAC from Apple Music, so your MP3 is a transcode. You should download the original file he shared.
I have to push back on this assertion. This interview, conducted during the With Teeth recording sessions, makes it clear that he does not record to tape:
Even if he did, we're not talking compact cassette recording here. Professional multitrack tape recording usually includes a time code track (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here) that would prevent the kind of playback speed issues we're seeing. IMO, the time stretching was deliberately introduced by our fraudster to hinder direct 1:1 comparisons.But Reznor does still swear by using computer technology for his own recording projects. “The idea of trying to work with tape is stupid to me, seems archaic and is not something I want to embrace [ . . . ] We have one main G4 running OS X with Pro Tools as our recorder”
Just tickles my balls!
I’m kind of at the point of happy being resigned to “we’ve been trolled,” but then there are the Rob Sheridan comments about them that throws a spanner into the works.
Administrator
tldr: If I had kept my With Teeth DE files around, I probably wouldn't have opened this thread back up
Grabbed that, put it in iZotope RX, and it's less lossy than my mp3 (obvy), but the archive.org Only shows slightly more spectral data:
The archive.org wav does not appear to show any degradation, Jon's MP4 appears to be missing some high frequency data, and the MP3 looks like it's been carved with a knife.
Not real sure what to make of that result.
For argument's sake - they've still got the Studer A800 Mk3 powered up in this mid-2004 photo, behind the 2600I have to push back on this assertion. This interview, conducted during the With Teeth recording sessions, makes it clear that he does not record to tape:
However the very fact that you can download the actual Pro Tools session of Only makes it pretty clear that they're multitracking directly to hard drive at this point. However, when it comes to a two-track master, they may still be bouncing that to tape. An early HTDA video was just a camera filming a tape machine playing back a two track master.
Pick any track that's on The Fragile, The Fragile Deviations, and The Fragile (DE), and load them into your multitrack DAW of choice. Line them up. All three fall out of sync with each other - but they were still multitracking to tape with The Fragile. Let's focus on With Teeth, since we do have a couple of versions to work with there.Even if he did, we're not talking compact cassette recording here. Professional multitrack tape recording usually includes a time code track (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here) that would prevent the kind of playback speed issues we're seeing. IMO, the time stretching was deliberately introduced by our fraudster to hinder direct 1:1 comparisons.
So for Getting Smaller, I dragged in the L & R channels from the 5.1 mix into Reaper, and aligned it with my CD rip, and by the end of the track, there's a 1/4 second difference - the surround mixes are a teensy bit slower. I lined it up with the archive.org version, and they're very, very close - but not perfectly synchronized the way the two EDEITS CD rips were. And like the CD rip, when I phase-cancel between the 5.1 surround and the archive.org version, it mostly cancels except for certain snare hits. The DE version doesn't match up with the CD or the 5.1 version.
However, it almost perfectly aligns with what's on archive.org after the first kick. The intro guitar doesn't exactly line up with the CD, the instrumental, archive, or DE.
So all those snare hits are fixes that got put in while making the DE. Curiously, the archive.org version has a longer cymbal tail than my DE audio file has, but now we're showing majority 2017 content in a file that's purported to be from 2005, I'm going to wave off the intro and outro discrepencies.
1) Every Day Is Exactly The Same- could TR have burned an MP3 and given WAVs to the label? Maybe, not likely.
2) Getting Smaller Every Day- Mixing discrepancies are because it's the DE mix
3) Only- When you take the lossy instrumental version and add vocals from the multitracks, it largely matches what's on archive.org, but archive.org doesn't appear to be a lossy copy. High frequency noise could have been dubbed in though.
4) The Hand That Feeds- This one stood out as weird from the get go, but I no longer give it any benefit of the doubt.
5) Cages- Given that the DE version of Getting Smaller matched up to the archive.org version, I grabbed the DE version of RWIB and dropped it in here, and it's the same story. Perfectly phase-canceled, aside from dithering noise (16-bit vs 24-bit). So the copy/paste error(?) in the instrumental version is carried over into the DE version, and the new piano is part of the DE mix.
I suppose if I broke down the differences between With Teeth (DE) and the original, I could have saved myself a bunch of time. The differences were so minute to me at the time that I didn't bother keeping the DE version on my hard drive.
Thank you for your patience. lol.
Administrator
I think everyone agrees that the physical CD that was sold is a real thing. It's the archive.org upload that's bogus.
P.S. Loving the social anxiety I created for myself here. A+
Memb, Member, The Membest
I think it's a proper place to ask about phase is these files and in music in general. We all know it is done for various effects here and there, some effects include watermarking to trace leaks. But for actual listening, for 2 recordings, is there a way to say: this is natural audio - and that is (or should be) inverted? or do our ears simply adjust to whatever and all that matters is frequency and amplitude?
i mean, in broad scope, let's say i brought home a new CD or downloaded a new file i never heard before. And perhaps it sounds weird. Is that because i just have to get accustomed, or because someone f---ed up with phase during recording, mixing, etc.
Last edited by BenAkenobi; 06-14-2021 at 02:50 AM. Reason: more words
Administrator
Trent Reznor, not fucking around when he says: "with lots of details attended to that you may never notice but we care about."
For the Getting Smaller intro and outro, the fraudster had to pull those from the Instrumental, because all the album versions have segues into and out of the previous and next tracks.
Yeah, I think he added in 18+ KHz noise to everything he used to try to hide any lossy segments that he used from a spectrogram, because those segments (Getting Smaller intro/outro, RWIB intro, etc.) would have stood out like a sore thumb at the points where they join with the lossless audio segments from the DE.
For example, I did spectrograms of the beginning of Cages and RWIB:
Amadeus ProScreenSnapz001.png
The middle spectrogram is the first 16 seconds of Cages. The left spectrogram is the beginning from RWIB Instrumental. As you can see, it matches the first 13 seconds of Cages. The right spectrogram is the first 3 seconds of the RWIB album version. And as you can see, it matches seconds 13-16 of Cages. But you can see that Cages has just a mass of noise added to 18+ Khz.
Just tickles my balls!
hahahahaha
*brohug*
Administrator
It's funny because I easily picked out changes in TDS on the first play, didn't bother analyzing The Fragile because I was just glad to have the vinyl-only tracks in lossless digital audio, and I played through With Teeth DE a couple of times in a couple of pairs of headphones, and never listened to the DE version again. Or so I thought...
Anyway - there's a particular reason I recently revisited this topic, which I may go into later (nothing earth shattering, just something fun I'm working on) - in a way, I'm glad to lay out the specific details around the debunking of this audio first.
If it's just simply inverting the phase, you're not going to be able to tell with your own ears. With Teeth (DE) has inverted phase from With Teeth (2005). The only reason you can tell is because of audio editors that show the waveform of the track you're editing. Aside from that, it's imperceptible.
That's not to say you can't fuck up phase during recording - whenever you've got two microphones in a room recording the same signal, you have to be careful about placement, because you can run into phasing issues when you combine the audio from both mics. Broken famously has "Not for use with mono devices" in the liner notes; Trent's employing phase in a non-natural way on things like the snare drum in Happiness in Slavery, essentially giving it maximum width in the stereo field by taking a mono sound source, putting it into to channels, panning them left and right, and then inverting the phase of one of the channels. To oversimplify: in headphones, or out of speakers, this makes it sound 'surround', and you could theoretically get a similar effect if you set up a pair of microphones opposite each other around (for example) a snare drum. The mics are receiving (basically) the same sound waves, but in opposite directions. Where you run into trouble is when you use a number of mics on the same sound source, placed in different spots in the room, and then start to mix them down, especially if you play with playback timing. This can result in a kind of comb filter effect, where certain frequencies cancel each other out. Once you have an ear for the sound, you can pick it out a lot in television production, I've found. A kind of hollow sound, resonating on specific frequency bands.
As a kid, I'd notice this when there was some kind of droning machine (e.g. an outdoor unit for an air conditioner) that was placed somewhere that allowed its sound to reflect off a wall. As you walk around, you hear a kind of flangeing effect, because you're hearing the inverted phase of the reflection off the wall, combining with the original sound source, and depending on your physical placement, the sound phase is cancelling out different bands of frequencies.
My first guitar pedal was a distortion pedal, and my second was an MXR Phase 90 phaser
Active Member
I mean, I thought it was legitimately interesting to watch all the forensics and deductive reasoning being done by you and @TheBang.
Administrator
If I had more time I would have done this sort of thing when the DE records came out. I'd done some lightweight analysis of the 10 year anniversary edition of TDS when it came out, which I thought was mildly interesting at the time, but after doing that batch of investigation, I couldn't justify the same amount of detail on three releases, especially while things were particularly hectic IRL for me.
By comparison, I had the week off last week, and I was excited at the prospect of this being real, despite the odds. It was not lost on me that many of the lyrics I was hearing over and over again during the process were about reality vs illusion & self-delusion.
Administrator
Well, I see that we certainly kept you busy going back and forth on the Wiki edits.
Just tickles my balls!
Our OCD is not to be messed with!
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