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.

[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.

[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?