Cool Hidden Track Most of You Already Have ...

If you are using Windows XP then there’s a little buried aural treasure right in front of you that most of you have never heard before.

The installation music which is part of the Microsoft OOBE, or Out-Of-Box Experience, is a sweet ambient electronic composition that will take you away for 5 minutes and 24 seconds.

It is a hidden file inside an XP system folder that on most PCs is never heard, even if it is, then it’s only once, as background entertainment during the XP installation. Mainly you have not heard it before because most PCs have XP pre-installed. So unless you had to do a reinstall on your operating system you probably have missed out on this.

The track is titled "Windows Welcome music" and the artist is Microsoft. The file name on your computer is title.wma

No one knows for sure who composed this piece of music, but the big rumor is that it was done by the legendary Brian Eno who was the composer for the Windows 95 startup sound (properly titled as "The Microsoft Sound") and possibly some other Windows sounds of which he might have been uncredited for (though he did get paid $35,000 to create the original 6-second W95 startup sound).

You can find this file by going to: C:\WINDOWS\system32\oobe\images and look for the file called ‘title.wma’ or ‘Windows welcome music.wma’. Double-click the file and it will open in your media player. You might have to set your Windows Explorer settings to view hidden system files if you can't find it.

Watch your subwoofer as the bass is pretty heavy.

This composition is actually from the Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 installation CD from 1996. Microsoft included it again in 2001 in Windows eXPerience, a.k.a. XP.

For those of you not using Windows XP, you can just enjoy the sound right here: