Hidden Tracks
I was listening to Jarvis Cocker's new album on the way to work this morning. It's pretty good (obvious Jarvis/Pulp stylings but with an all new twist) right up until the end of track thirteen (the last track listed). Why? Well, it has a fourteenth track (Running the World, not for those easily offended by bad language) that plays after thirty minutes of silence. Thirty minutes of silence? Yep, a whole half an hour of nothing.
Now I'm all for bonuses and extra tracks on CDs are great but why have these massive gaps? If I'm listening to an album it's becasue I want to hear the music, not silence. Even more annoying is that it is effectively the same track on the CD as Quantum Leap (the last listed song) so when importing it into iTunes I get one MP3 with half an hour of silence. Sorry, but that's just rubbish.
The most imaginative way of including an extra track was on the B-sides collection (Lousy With Love) that Del Amitri released at the same time as their singles collection. After track 14 there are 83 one second tracks that count up so that track 98 is the last track (the album was released in 1998). Not only is this quite clever but it means that I can MP3alise the album without all the extra silence.
I demand that the music industry sit up and take note. No? Oh well, at least I tried.
Ash put hidden tracks on their album “1977″ BEFORE the first track, so you had to rewind the cd!
January 24th, 2007 at 8:02 amPAIN IN THE BUM, as a lot of CD players won’t go into negative timeslots!
Good tracks though!
Blimey, that’s pretty clever but imagine you never found out about it and simply listened to the track listed? How gutting!
January 24th, 2007 at 8:06 amDavid Gray did the same with White Ladder! It’s a cover of…. can’t remember!
January 24th, 2007 at 8:52 amNo way! I have just become that of which I joked! I must check that out when I get home…
January 24th, 2007 at 12:35 pmThe second Stone Roses album did the whole 99 track thing I recall, the bonus track being somewhere amongst all the 1 seconds tracks.
I dont mind when turning long quiet tracks into mp3 as you can edit them and cut out all the silence. Still a pain mind, guess they try and make it some kind of reward to someone who actually listens to the whole album.
January 24th, 2007 at 7:38 pmSimon - what do you use to edit MP3s? I’d love to remove that pointless silence!
January 25th, 2007 at 7:08 amDo you own ITUNES?
Well. Lesson #1 from me to you.
0. Rip the CD to hard drive.
1. Copy the track.
2. Adjust the start and end times.
3. Convert the Selection to MP3.
4. Delete the copy or repeat for the Quantum Leap track, as then you will have the Quantum Leap without the 30 mins of silence.
This way, you will get 2 MP3s, one for each song.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:08 amSBG - you rock. It worked a treat.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:41 amIf you dont have iTunes I just use Adobe Audition (upgrade of what was soundforge). You visually edit the audio file then save it to what format you want. Older versions of Soundforge (5 ideally) are easier to use mind if you can get hold of a copy.
January 25th, 2007 at 1:37 pm