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Topic: Blank/silent/hidden tracks (Read 10234 times) previous topic - next topic
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Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Hi,

Many CDs seem to have to have several tracks of silence in between songs, for instance the album "Undertow" by Tool has tracks 11 through 68 as one-second blank tracks with a song on 69. I was wondering how you guys deal with these tracks in archiving, transferring to a portable player, tagging, etc. Do you even bother saving or tagging these music files? For my archiving hard drive I keep them because I feel good knowing I have the exact image of the CD, but when transferring to a lossy format for everyday listening I discard them.

And what do guys think about the placement of "hidden tracks" on albums today? Do you believe the trend of placing songs before the pregap and other techniques used are getting out of hand or annoying?

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #1 –
Quote from: Frostmourne on
...but when transferring to a lossy format for everyday listening I discard them.
...Do you believe the trend of placing songs before the pregap and other techniques used are getting out of hand or annoying?
1) Sounds like you've already settled on a way to do it. I certainly wouldn't put 50 1second tracks on any of my DAPs.

2) Uhhh.... no. Do you? I've seen very few albums that do this. Like, out of my ~400 cds, I can't even think of five.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #2 –
Hidden tracks can be annoying.

I have about 6 CDs that have hidden tracks.

Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar

Has about 16 tracks and 85 tracks of silence and a hidden track, I did'nt bother ripping the silent tracks and just tagged the hidden track number as 17 and got the track title from freedb.

Nine Inch Nails - Broken (EP)

Has about 6 tracks and 92 silent tracks and 2 hidden tracks "Psysical #7" "Suck #8", I did'nt bother ripping the silent tracks and changed the track numbers on the hidden track numbers as 7 and 8.

Nirvana - Nevermind

The last track "Something In The Way #12" has several minutes of silence and then a hidden track "Endless, Nameless", I ripped the last track as different wavs without the silence by ripping the track at a certain lenth e.g 0-3:54 for "Something In The Way #12" 16:58 - end of CD for "Endless, Nameless #13".

Nirvana - In Utero

The last track "All Apologies #12" has several minutes of silence and then a hidden track "Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip", I ripped the last track as different wavs without the silence by ripping the track at a certain lenth e.g 0-3:54 for "All Apologies #12" 18:58 - end of CD for "Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip #13".

Slipknot - Slipknot

The last track "Scissors #14" has couple minutes of silence and then a hidden track "Eeyore", I ripped the last track as different wavs without the silence by ripping the track at a certain lenth e.g 0-8:24 for "Scissors #14" 10:58 - end of CD for "Eeyore #15".

System Of A Down - Toxcity

The last track "Aerials #14" has couple seconds of silence and then a hidden track "Arto", I ripped the last track as different wavs without the silence by ripping the track at a certain lenth e.g 0-3:54 for "Aerials #14" 3:58 - end of CD for "Arto #15".
"I never thought I'd see this much candy in one mission!"

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #3 –
/mnt,

Do you have any discs with a hidden track in the extended pregap (this is to say before track 1)?

I suppose numbering such a track with 00 is one option.

Dealing with these tracks is much easier than dealing with hidden tracks at the end since they can be extracted directly.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #4 –
Quote from: greynol on
/mnt,

Do you have any discs with a hidden track in the extended pregap (this is to say before track 1)?

I suppose numbering such a track with 00 is one option.

Dealing with these tracks is much easier than dealing with hidden tracks at the end since they can be extracted directly.


I don'nt know what to do with the hidden pregap track on Songs For The Deaf by Queens Of The Stone Age the first track appears red on EAC at first I thought it was error.

"I never thought I'd see this much candy in one mission!"

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #5 –
Quote from: greynol on
Do you have any discs with a hidden track in the extended pregap (this is to say before track 1)?

The only CD I have that has this is Kylie Minogue's "Light Years".  The sad thing is that out of three CD drives on my family's computers, none of them can (or will) rip the pregap before track 1, so the only way I can listen to it is with my old stereo.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #6 –
Melotron's Weltfrieden has a track hidden in the pregap and I just named it "00 - Hidden Track".  It was just a huge pain because it took me years to realize my dad's old Dell laptop could rip it perfectly fine when none of my drives could.
"Have you ever been with a woman? It's like death. You moan, you scream and then you start to beg for mercy, for salvation"

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #7 –
There was a cd (was it aerosmith?) that had some tracks splitted by indexes instead of pregap tracks. Ayreon - flight of the migrator is like that, too.

I deal with them like that:
First i rip them with EAC as image with cue-sheet. Then i edit the cue-sheet with wordpad and make a stand-alone title out of each hidden track, pregap track, splitted track, silence and whatever. After that i complete the informations in foobar2000, leave out the silences and use the converter to produce my flac-/mp3-files (with mareo).

In this way i also edit CDs with meesed up cue-sheets. For example some Queen CDs released by Parlophone (not EMI!) have wrong indexes, missplaced by some frames.

You have to take care, that you alter the track-numbers after inserting a new track.

Famous for annoying pregap tracks: Limp Bizkit. What do i need the pregap track of the following song if i only want to hear "behind blue eyes"?

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #8 –
Quote from: greynol on
Do you have any discs with a hidden track in the extended pregap (this is to say before track 1)?

I suppose numbering such a track with 00 is one option.
This thread lists quite a few.

I have used the "00 - <title>.mp3" naming scheme, but I must admit it has annoyed me at times, the last being when I moved Bloc Party's "Silent Alarm" to my car and now don't get a thumping first track as I expect.

I think they may do better being stuck at the end of the "playlist", as they are often substandard, or just don't fit with the rest of the album.  JMHO.

TRACK 01 INDEX 00 Tracks
I rip to image so I just make a temporary cuesheet to extract these tracks.  IIRC they can be extracted as a Range in EAC.  As /mnt alluded to, you can easily tell whether a disc has one of these tracks as the later versions (>= 0.95b1) of EAC highlight the track red.

Multiple tracks of silence
Get rid of 'em!  Again with image cuesheets you can just merge all these into one track, so it's a little easier to deal with.

One track containing two songs, split by a period of silence
Again, this can be dealt with a temporary cuesheet, although that means me guessing the end of the first track and the beginning of the second, by seeking while playing in foobar.  The other option is to get the track as one WAV, and do the split more accurately in an editor like Audacity.  You can then either encode the two new files, or use the timings to adapt the cuesheet more accurately.
I'm on a horse.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #9 –
Some purists say, "The artist meant to have that passage silent." Well, I tend to find that particular portion of the artist's work boring. No offense, John Cage.
Cut the silence out! Will you really miss it?

Also see this thread for more on pre-track 1 bonus tracks.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #10 –
I just select the first track and use "Copy Selected Tracks Index-Based"

I keep the 01.00 track and delete the 01.01 track; pretty straight forward.

The red highlight is nifty, but all you need to do is look at the start time for the first track if you're running previous versions.

But considering that some drives can't handle HTOA and having to use some type of editor to split hidden tracks off from the end of the last track I would have to answer the OP's last question as yes, hidden tracks are annoying.

BTW, I have a drive that can extract HTOA but can't read from the lead-in and there are drives that do just the opposite.  The BENQ DW1620, for example, can't extract HTOA but can read from the lead-in, so I'd say the generalization made in the other thread about HTOA and reading form the lead-in doesn't hold water.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #11 –
Quote from: greynol on
BTW, I have a drive that can extract HTOA but can't read from the lead-in and there are drives that do just the opposite.  The BENQ DW1620, for example, can't extract HTOA but can read from the lead-in, so I'd say the generalization made in the other thread about HTOA and reading form the lead-in doesn't hold water.
No, for an "answer" to that one you need to look at this thread.

Edit: to save some of you a fair amount of reading the basic upshot is that the ability to read TRACK 01 INDEX 00 tracks is not related to lead-in or -out capabilities, but solely whether the drive designers have decided that the drive can read TRACK 01 INDEX 00 or not.  Therefore you need to look at the thread quoted above which attempts to list some drives that definately can, or buy a drive and hope it can.  Plextors seem, generally, to be able to do this, from what I've seen.

Edit 2:  Another option is to look at http://www.daefeatures.co.uk/, which lists which drives have HTOA access.
I'm on a horse.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #12 –
Quote from: greynol on
But considering that some drives can't handle HTOA and having to use some type of editor to split hidden tracks off from the end of the last track I would have to answer the OP's last question as yes, hidden tracks are annoying.
But tracks wouldn't be "hidden" if no technique was employed.  Would you rather there was no track at all?

It's like complaining that Steve Irwin is too Autralian...
I'm on a horse.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #13 –
Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
But tracks wouldn't be "hidden" if no technique was employed.  Would you rather there was no track at all?
Sure, from the standpoint of viewing them from a computer.  The intention of putting a hidden track on a disc is not to force people to take extra measures with software to extract and/or index the bonus audio data.  There are plenty in the business who would prefer that discs never get loaded into a computer.

A track with no information about it in the packaging, even though it has its own number on the disc can also be regarded as hidden.

No need to get snippy by asking a non sequitur question that is rhetorical.  Whether I want the track has nothing to do with being annoyed by the way it is stored.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #14 –
Quote from: greynol on
The intention of putting a hidden track on a disc is not to force people to take extra measures with software to extract and/or index the bonus audio data.
The whole point of a hidden track is to force people to take extra measures, whether it be listening or ripping.

Quote from: greynol on
No need to get snippy by asking a non sequitur question that is rhetorical.  Whether I want the track has nothing to do with being annoyed by the way it is stored.
I thought it was a perfectly valid question, and not at all rhetorical.  What I'm questioning is why you may complain about something that is additional to the advertised track listing.  It seems to me that you would rather they were not there.  I may even ask the question again:  would you rather they were there or not?  If you had the choice of the standard track listing or the standard track listing plus a hidden track which would you choose?  I honestly don't know what your answer would be to this question, which means it is not rhetorical.

I would suggest that these tracks are often hidden as they do not fit well with the rest of the album.  Therefore, I suspect that often they would never make the album, if they were required to be added to the main track list.  If this is the case I would rather they hid it.
I'm on a horse.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #15 –
Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
The whole point of a hidden track is to force people to take extra measures, whether it be listening or ripping.
No extra measures are required to listen to a hidden track that is appended to the last track unless you wish to access it directly.
Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
It seems to me that you would rather they were not there.
Why do you make this assumption?
Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
I may even ask the question again:  would you rather they were there or not?
"May" or "will"?
This is a subjective matter.  If I like the bonus material, sure I'd rather that it were there.  If I don't like it then it doesn't matter to me one way or the other except that I appreciate the novelty.
That I find the method of extracting and/or indexing to be annoying is irrelevant.
Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
If you had the choice of the standard track listing or the standard track listing plus a hidden track which would you choose?
I gave you a third option, why did you dismiss it?

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #16 –
Quote from: greynol on
No extra measures are required to listen to a hidden track that is appended to the last track unless you wish to access it directly.
Same with ripping.

Quote from: greynol on
Why do you make this assumption?
You are complaining about them.  I apologise if you found my assumption offensive.

Quote from: greynol on
I gave you a third option, why did you dismiss it?
You accuse me of rhetoric and then demand I consider a theoretical alternative? 

I won't post on this further.
I'm on a horse.

Blank/silent/hidden tracks

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
You are complaining about them.  I apologise if you found my assumption offensive.

All I said was:
Quote from: greynol on
But considering that some drives can't handle HTOA and having to use some type of editor to split hidden tracks off from the end of the last track I would have to answer the OP's last question as yes, hidden tracks are annoying.
I simply answered a yes or no question.  For you to suggest that this constitutes "complaining" isn't correct.

Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
You accuse me of rhetoric and then demand I consider a theoretical alternative? 
Demand? 

Maybe I didn't make myself clear earlier.

Third option:
A track with no information about it in the packaging, yet it has its own number.

This is a real alternative that is used with some commercial CDs.
I'm curious as to why you didn't bother to acknowledge it.

In the context of the original discussion, this is an example of a hidden track that might not be considered as annoying.