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

[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...