Nearly a year after it's initial release, Radiohead fansite message boards were buzzing with some new information about Kid A. People had found out that with two copies of the album you could overlap the tracks seventeen seconds into each other and they would flow together perfectly. This was quickly dubbed "Kid 17" and a legend was born.

This generally works well with every song on the album, but sounds particularly cool with tracks like Everything In It’s Right Place, Kid A (the song), or Idioteque; tracks that have a lot of different sounds and such. Kid 17 definitely adds a whole new dimension to album and is worth a listen.

You can go about executing Kid 17 in a few ways.

  1. The easiest way is with a WAV editor or any other sound editing program that will allow you to "mix paste" or to overlap songs. I've used Cool Edit to do this and it works really well.
  2. Another way, still on the computer, is to have two MP3 players going at the same time. It's a little bit harder to get everything timed correctly this way, but I've seen it done with Winamp a few times.
  3. The most difficult way is with two real copies of Kid A. If you have any two sound systems (cd player, boombox, TV, computer with speakers, whatever) you can set them up and play your two copies of Kid A on them. The best way to do this is with two CD players, but even then it's sometimes hard to get it right.

If you want to take the cheap way out MP3 files of Kid 17 can still be found on various filesharing programs like Soulseek and Kazaa. But for those of you who want to try it out on your own here are a few tips to get yourself going.

  • Don't sync up the album, sync up individual songs. After one song is over, hit stop and start another song freshly.
  • Some timing might be off on your record, whether it's because of silence before tracks or scratches or something like that.
  • If it starts to sound horrible stop and try again. You need patience to get the songs playing together at the same time.

Enjoy.