I hate hidden "tracks" on CDs

[jducoeur]

Hate them, hate them, hate them. You've probably encountered this: where the final track seems to end, but actually has a bunch of silence followed by another song, to see if you're going to keep listening, or just give up and switch albums.

They were a cute gimmick back in the days of LPs, but they're just plain irritating when I'm doing most of my listening on a shuffled iPod. It's especially annoying when it's a really good last track, ending with several minutes of silence, and then a cutesy final song that isn't nearly as good: this often makes ripping the track more trouble than it's worth, since I don't want that silence to show up in Shuffle Play. (Yes, I can snip it at the start of the silence, but it's a hassle I'm tired of.)

Really: enough is enough. It was clever the first thousand times, but it's an idea whose time has long since passed...

Comments

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

I think it's worse when it's a fantastic song after a so-so or a crappy one. Then you have 3-7 minutes before you can get to the good stuff.

[ckd]

Agreed. It's definitely a hassle, and I hate it as well. (What might be worse is putting a hidden track in "track 0", since iTunes won't rip it and you won't even know it's there unless you hear about it. cdparanoia will rip it, though.)

The hassle-full fix is to use iTunes start/stop times to select the first song, "convert to AAC", change them to select the second song, repeat, and rename the files appropriately. PAIN IN THE BUTT.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, that's more or less what I'm doing. (Ripping to MP3 instead of AAC, but otherwise the same idea.) Bloody nuisance...

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Trent Reznor did it best with Broken. There were 80-someodd (entirely) blank tracks followed by a good song. So ripping it to .mp3 should not be an issue.

[laurion]

Hear, hear.

Yes, it's easy enough to use something like audacity to split the file into two songs with no silence, but having to do that more than 2 or 3 times is like salt on a wound.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Right, DMB did the same with whatever CD "#34" is on -- 12 tracks, 21 blanks, #34.

Still got those 21 0-length blanks that can show up in shuffle, but at least they're easy to delete.

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

And really, wasn't the point to add some value to CD buyers without making it too obvious that LP buyers were getting the short end? Do we still need to protect all those LP buyers?

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Oh, is that why there's a minute or so of silence after a song on that SHeDAISY CD? I could never figure that bit out...

And what's an LP?

[jducoeur]

Oh, is that why there's a minute or so of silence after a song on that SHeDAISY CD?

Quite possibly. The usual pattern is that this happens on the last song on the disc, and there's a long silence, ending with *something*. (Sometimes a whole song, sometimes just random blather.) Newer records have occasionally fiddled with that pattern randomly, for no obvious reason. (Not that it makes much sense to begin with.)

And what's an LP?

... Okay, this is one of those questions where I'm afraid you provoke a reaction of "you make me feel so *old*" among your friends. It's a reasonable question, but a bit startling, because it had never occurred to me that the term has fallen out of common parlance.

"LP" is short for "Long Playing" -- it's the standard shorthand, used for decades, for full-sized vinyl records. I still own a few hundred of them, although they are rarely played any more...