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

[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...