An old computer trick / prank / "fun" thing to do was piping random things to /dev/audio, or finding whatever program was available that could take any old file and not complain while translating it to audio by some means or another.

On my distro there are at least three of these programs installed by default: aplay, paplay and pw-play.

Some or all of these will complain if the file or stream they're given isn't a recognisable audio file, in which case, there's a --raw or similar flag where it'll just shrug and blast whatever through the sound system. If you're creative, you can set different sample rates and hear it at different speeds.

VLC is just a really fancy way of doing the same thing.

For even more "fun", try opening a file in Audacity / Tenacity, which will default to raw mode if it can't tell what a file is, and you get to see the waveform and so on. Just take care not to modify and save over an important file with that.

When the game 7th Guest came out (though I'm sure there were others) it was on a mixed CD, part soundrack audio and part game data. But if you had an older CD playing stereo that didn't block track zero, you could listen to the data. It was early EDM for the crowd that listened to modem handshakes for fun.

Is this music for binary people?

I think you can play DVDs ripped into .iso in VLC. You need to remap the extension to open from whatever application you have for mounting the iso as a disk.

VLC can play isos of video dvds and blurays. So it's probably trying to do the same here.

An ISO file is just binary data representing the data on an optical disk.

So it makes sense that VLC can in principle open ISO files, they could be audio CDs or movie DVDs. I suppose what you see here is the result of it doing its best to "show" a DVD containing something entirely different.

They say vlc can play anything, but I didn't know is was so literal

I'm kinda shocked that kids don't know anymore that playing a dvd ripped iso is a basic thing we did years ago. Even menu selecting on it worked.

Kubuntu 25.10 is my favourite album.

Although their 24.04 album wasn't bad either.