So how to the rest of you deal with annoying ``hidden'' tracks, etc?

Some ``hidden'' tracks are simply unnumbered (on the label, anyway) tracks at the end of the CD. Fairly obvious how to deal with those.

But what about the other, more annoying, types?

Like the ones that are on the same track as the last song, separated from it by large amounts of silence? These are remarkably annoying. Do you guys rip to WAV and split them and then mp3-ize the new shorter WAVs? And, if so, do you keep the silence? What if it's not really silence, but extra-quiet ``stuff'', for lack of a better word?

Or the ones whose CDs have 12 tracks, then 48 blank tracks, then another song at track 59? Do you mark them as tracks 1-13 or tracks 1-12 and 59? (Not that this makes a load of difference on the empeg, as it doesn't show track numbers anywhere, really.) And, again, what about the intervening tracks? Do you keep those?

And, tangentially, do recording artists really think that this concept is entertaining? That, in order to listen to their music, I have to go through this rigamarole to get to it? I mean, I remember back in the early days of CDs when artists would put actual hidden tracks on, where there would be an additional track after the CD stop indicator, so you'd have to fast forward to it, and I understood that; it was kind of like equivalent of a B-side -- something that they thought didn't quite fit, but thought you might like to hear anyway. Now it's just a bad joke.

you mean like this one
http://www.emusic.com/cd/10594/10594580.html

For the ones that have an extra song stuck on the end of the last track I just leave it as is. I figure that's they way they wanted it.

I have a procedure for all of this.

First, I rip to WAV anyway, because I use the --nogap switch in LAME all the time. If the "hidden track" is part of the last track on the disc, separated by much silence, I will open them in an editor and cut out the silence to create two new WAV files, one the original track number and name, the other's track number being +1, and usually named Untitled.

If the "hidden track" is its own track separated from the rest of the album by many short silent tracks, I simply cut the in-between tracks. I don't want silence in my car; it's a Civic (road noise). But if the in-between tracks actually contain audio, i.e., transitional sounds, then I will keep them.

As for whether or not this hidden track nonsense is entertaining -- I never gave it much thought. I have just accepted it as something that is and I'm happy to have the extra music. Since I use my empeg, I don't mind the few extra steps necessary to avoid wasting space with silence.

I agree the hidden tracks are a pain.

I haven't seen an easy way to deal with them. I wish that the hidden track info could be somehow encoded into the CDDB data and then rippers could read that information and behave accordingly.

I have done all of the following things in the past:

- Ignored the issue and just let the two track get ripped as one long track with a space of silence in the middle. Often I just hit the skip button when the silence starts playing.

- Adjusted the "ending time" of the last track in the ripping software to grab the last "regular" track, and then adjusted the start and ending time of the last track to grab the hidden track.

- Split the MP3 into three songs (lastrack, silence, bonustrack) using the splitting utility in GapKiller, then discarding the middle one (silence) and VBR-fixing and retagging the remaining two tracks.

I've never gone to the trouble of cutting up a raw WAV of the track, too much of a pain dealing with huge files in CoolEdit.

I have no problem dealing with large files... but then I'm not running CoolEdit. Nero's Wave Editor does a wonderful job for me.

i don't care too much about the 'hidden' track issue. But what really gets my goat is the "enhanced" track that many cd's now have. You know, the data track at the end of the cd with that lame-ass video on it that "may or may not" play on your computer. Many times I dont notice these useless tracks on the cd before i rip them. Then, late at night, when the music is low and i'm trying to put the moves on my friend's mom....

BBBBBBWWWWWRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!

that damn data track always seems to show up at the wrong time. Then I have to remember to delete it off the empeg, or the entire episode happens again.

The most irritating ones are where the last track has ten minutes of silence separating the "bonus track" - sometimes I'm not aware of this until it's on the player and it goes quiet. I'll either edit the WAV, or set Grip's start and end sectors when ripping, depending on whether CD drive time or my personal time is the highest priority to me.

I've never seen a disc with a bunch of empty tracks between the last real track, but I think it'd be less of a pain.

As to how I arrange them in playlists, it depends. Some obviously need the separation, and I have a 10-second silent track I use for that (in some cases, multiple instances, but never more than 1 minute). Others could easily have been part of the original album, and just go in at the end.

Some CDs have bonus tracks that weren't on the album when it was originally released on vinyl. In some cases, these are singles or B-sides, and they go loose in the artist's playlist. In other cases, they are outtakes or previously unreleased tracks - I often put these into a sub-playlist, so I can select the original album (tunes icon), the bonus tracks ("bonus tracks" playlist) or the whole lot (play icon). Often, I set track numbers to 0 if I think the bonus tracks are thrown in and the order doesn't matter.

In one particular case (Capercaillie's "The Blood Is Strong" re-issue), there are 6 bonus tracks: 3 from each of two TV series' soundtracks. I consider these to be two very small bonus albums, and have playlisted it as such.

I do agree with you that in general, "hidden" bonus tracks are a pain - why can't the labels just make accurate labels (on-disc and on the inlay) for their CDs?

For tracks that are included in the last track, such as Nirvana's Nevermind which ends with "Endless, Nameless", I leave it in. Most of these MP3's will be listened to on my computer as well, and I want them to be played like they would on the album.

The hidden tracks that I hate are the ones that are seperated by a number of blank tracks. Some cases they're odd, but forgiveable. Rob Zombie has an album I think where there's about 10 of these tracks, but each is about 5 seconds long and has some extremely quiet noise going on in the background. That's at least a little interesting. Dave Matthews Band, on the other hand, is annoying. I think it's on Under the Table and Dreaming where they have about 20 tracks that are each about ZERO seconds long. That's annoying and pointless.

But then there's the album that you dislike, Bitt. At the end of Queens of the the Stone Age's new album Songs for the Deaf, there's a song that is listed on the back of the CD cover as "Mosquito Song (Hidden Track)". I found that pretty funny

As for those data CDs, the problem I always had with them was that the last song on an album wouldn't get ripped. Audiocatalyst at least wouldn't rip the data track, but would have trouble with the last song. I havn'e ripped any albums like that on EAC yet. How does it handle it?

Tool's undertow has about 60 2-second silent tracks before "disgustipated" on track 69. I deleted them all. I'm not sophisticated enough to be editing the minutes of silence out of "bonus tracks" which appear at the end of a normal track... Normally the bonus tracks aren't worthy of such labor.

Then, late at night, when the music is low and i'm trying to put the moves on my friend's mom....

Nice...

But what really gets my goat is the "enhanced" track that many cd's now have.

What drive and ripper are you using? The software should be able to detect that it's a data track and not attempt to rip it as audio.

I'm pretty unsophisticated. I'm using an HP 8100 CD-RW and "Alto MP3 Maker" as software. I use it because the quality is above average and usability is very easy. Of course now I'm beginning to rethink that...

There's nothing wrong with Alto. EAC is just better. If I had never discovered EAC, I'd still be using it today.

Edit: And if I remember correctly, AltoMP3 Maker will rip a data track as audio if you don't manually deselect that track's checkbox.

I used alto but when my ide cdrom died it quit using it (it didn't work with my scsi drive)

Now I use easy cddax

Then, late at night, when the music is low and i'm trying to put the moves on my friend's mom....

Please tell me you're joking.

joking?

These didn't bother me before the empeg days, and actually I thought they were kind of cool. Now I do admit I don't like hidden tracks as they mess up my random plays. The worst CD by far is "Jars Of Clay" which has a recording of a 20 min. rehearsal with the violin players tacked on to the end. I don't remember what I did for this track, I suspect I just didn't include the song on my empeg.

Can't remember which Nine Inch Nails album it is, but there are something like 16 real tracks and 83 blank ones, so the last song is Track 99. And the names on the inlay didn't match up.

So I ended up with the excitingly titled "Track 99" and have no idea what it is really called (Can't guess it from the lyrics, typical NIN) but I know what it is so it's cool.

I don't let my machine with rip/encode software connect to the internet so no CDDB for me. I was going to dload it, but too big.

I have a related rant dealing with live albums. Sometimes the engineers do a sloppy job at partitioning the recording into the individual tracks. Like on a track, the lingering chord from the last song would be at the very beginning.

a rather annoying one that ive found is the apartment 26 album "hallucinating"

i think its like 12 tracks then 13 tracks of 15 seconds each, each one containing a gradually rising tone until the end of track 25. then it has an awesome song on track 26.

Like on a track, the lingering chord from the last song would be at the very beginning.

Sometimes they can't help that, because CD track indices must fall one 1-second boundaries. So if the two are really close together, sometimes they have to make a choice between letting a split second of the prior song appear, or cutting off a split second of the next song.

Of course, if you're talking about ones where there's a long lull between the songs and the engineer was just sloppy, then yeah that's irritating.

One thing I particularly hate is the habit of indexing a live CD so that the artists' "talking introduction" is at the end of the prior track instead of at the beginning of the track it goes with. Makes shuffles really suck: "I'd like to play a song for you that I wrote about the sweetest girl I ever knew. Jenny, this one's for you..." <BZZT> NIN's "Closer" plays instead.

Occasionally, I've deliberately done some cutting and pasting of the rips to put the intros properly onto the song they're supposed to go with. But boy what a pain in the ass.

I agree...I have a live Aerosmith album that has a couple tracks like that. At least we have the flexibility to fix them now...it used to annoy me to no end when I was listening to the CD.

> Sometimes they can't help that, because CD track indices must fall one
> 1-second boundaries.
Not quite. The table-of-contents specifies track start-points as
an integral number of `subcode blocks' of 1/75 second each.

> So if the two are really close together, sometimes
> they have to make a choice between letting a split second of the prior
> song appear, or cutting off a split second of the next song.
Each track must last at least 2 seconds. This is because of the way the
Red Book specifies the most primitive track-seek mechanism: the P-channel
must mark at least two seconds before a track change occurs so a dumb
CD player can try to hit roughly the right spot by dead reckoning using
the absolute subcode block number given in the TOC, then whizz forwards
looking for where the P-channel bit changes from 1 to 0.

In reply to:

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So I ended up with the excitingly titled "Track 99" and have no idea what it is really called (Can't guess it from the lyrics, typical NIN) but I know what it is so it's cool.

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the album you're refering to is broken. tracks 98 and 99 are called 'physical' and 'suck' respectively.

th reason for this particular arrangement on the disc was because broken originally came with an additional 3" CD with those two tracks but record stores kept selling them as two separate CDs to make more money. tvt then countered by just slapping the tracks on the next production run to avoid upsetting nin fans.

if there is another nin album with hidden tracks it'll be news to me

Cheers, Jets.

Yup, it is 'broken' so I'll go and edit those names this evening when I get home.