Hey there,

I am wondering what everyone does with hidden tracks that appear on some artists' CDs.

Do you separate them or leave them as they are?

Skywalkerjen

I don't know what the consensus is here, but I'll tell you what I do.

Separate them using audio editor software and tag them as "hidden tracks" (if they have their own name, then "Track Name (hidden track #)" if not, just "Hidden Track #"

That way you have the option to listen to them, because sometimes the REAL reason bands hide tracks is to add some gimmicky "value" to songs that in most cases, well, suck...

I don't think that there's a "better" or "worse" approach. Seems just a matter of personal preference.

Most of the times I want to keep the copy of a cd (or even the mp3s of the tracks) the way people behind it wanted to be like, so I rarely alter the "structure" of it, by separating the hidden tracks. But that's just me...

I like keeping them together, because then I can use tools like automated cddb taggers on the mp3s/oggs/whatever. I used to prefer separated back when CBR was all the rage, and I can see why the 192CBR ripping groups often do (8MB of blank space is a waste), but with VBR it's not a big deal.

I always separate hidden tracks. I also cut out any extended segments of silence. That way I can either re-sequence the album (since I find that the sequencing on a lot of album sucks) or not listen to the song if it sucks.

Rob

I think you should try to replicate the artwork (the CD) as close as possible to what the artist wanted it to be like, so no cutting out here.

dev0

If the tracks are nonsense or annoying the go off to the bin (Korn - Korn). Long Silent parts I cut out with wave editor (Nirvana - Smells like...). Songs that go nowhere are left out also (Tool - Undertow, last song)
Good ones are treated like normal songs (Danzig - 4p, track 66), but those are very rare

Doesn't Foobar2000 have a bookmarking feature that treats a single track (listed song and hidden song) as two seperate playlist entries? I've never used this, but it sounds nifty.

Probably the only song I'd use it with is Mx by the Deftones, just so I wouldn't have to seek 30 minutes to hear "Damone".

Do you think the artist want you to listen to 10 minutes of silence? I don't think so.
I cut them, give them the next track-number and mark them as "hidden track"

That's exactly what I do. As if someone's gonna sit around for some 5+ odd minutes listening to silence saying ohh boy, golly gee this is my favorite track on the CD, "track number 57" that is.

I think the gimmick of adding all those silent minutes is very annoying and in the end it's just another thing to tick me off. The first time I ran across one of those dastardly CD's I thought "WTF, somebody really screwed up." Also alot of those hidden tracks don't seem as if any production went into them, they're very raw in most cases.

I always seperate them, more from a space point of view, can't see the point in filling my hard drive with x amount of silence between the last track and the hidden one. I just edit the WAV and make two new tracks, one labled as it should be (the last track) and one labled "Bonus Track" (it was all I could think of to call it) some are not bad but others I think are just put there to annoy rippers (it's a conspiracy I tell ya !! ), one album I ripped a couple of days ago only had people humming for about 2 minutes as the hidden track, I assume it was the group but who knows.

I separate the tracks.

But if someone would want a copy of the audio-CD, I would burn the hidden track as a separate track, but with a huge gap before it.

I cut out long silences.

I cut away noise - like the boiling kettle/your amp is broken joke on Type O Negative cds.

And I most definetely delete tracks I don't like.

If friends want a copy, they can either get what I have or buy the cd.

Editing ripped tracks is work. I'm lazy. Figure it out.

Actually, I'm more with the keep-the-cd-as-it-is crowd, but sometimes I do edit. If it's only a minute or two of silence, I don't bother. If it's a very long period I might edit.

But actually I haven't ripped many albums with hidden tracks, so it's not been much of an issue.

Well if the track is 1 long track with silence (and a song at the end) then I probably would keep it just like that, but if there is a bunch of silent tracks then I take those out. I'm gonna think about editing them sometime.

Seperate tracks for sure. That's one of the main reasons I rip everything to WAV and edit before encoding. Who wants to listen to 10 minutes of silence? Its really annoying when the hidden song is great (a cool acoutic number is trendy these days) and you have to listen to a garbage "last" song and 10 minutes of silence first.

I hope the itunes windows version coming out later this year allows the user to encode from WAVs vs. ripping right from CD, in order to download to my Ipod.

anybody know if I can rip hidden tracks with the demo version of CD architect?

if not, is there anything I can download a trial version of for ripping a hidden track?

I usually rip the entire track, then just rip the hidden part.

EAC? using "Copy Range" or "Append gaps to next track" for hidden tracks located before track 1.
There is more information on the forum from past posts, from what I remember.

Hope this helps, tec

If you are talking about a hidden track at the end of an album then I split the generated MP3 using mp3DirectCut, creating two (or more) MP3s with no gaps. The silence is discarded.

I mainly play MP3s in my car, which has an MP3 CD player (coincidentally). While I'm driving i really don't want to have to seek for five minutes to listen to the hidden track!

I really don't think "I like to keep the CD as the artist intended" is a sensible response. There is a large gap before a hidden track to make it "hidden" - not because the gap is supposed to be experienced as a track in its own right. Once you've found a hidden track it is no longer hidden... stick it with the others.

BTW: in opposition to the first response, some hidden tracks are actually quite good. The hidden track on Travis' "The Man Who" is one of my favourites on that album (which doesn't say a great deal admittedly).

thanks tec

I was trying to rip the hidden track before track 1. somebody told me they did it with CD architect, but I don't think they meant the trial version. I will give EAC a run when I get home.

thanks again for the help guys

Coincidentally, I was listening to a hidden track when I came across this topic.

I don't edit out hidden tracks merely because I am lazy. If there were an automagic extension to the freedb to edit them and give them tags then I would.

When a hidden track before the first track appears I rip it as separate track with #0 - the artists mostly have names for such a hidden tracks as well as for the hidden tracks in the end with a several minutes of silence in the beginning or in the middle part...
So I cut them all and the silent "gap" I write as a pregap before the hidden track so the album has already 1 more song.
Other thing is the artist's intent... I really doubt that they want you to have eg. 2 seconds of silence between 2 tracks, I think it's created by the engineers not the artists...
I mean not all the "gap or silence etc. features" are the artist's intent so you have to choose...

I'm lost like a MF with this EAC thing

can anybody clue me in how exactly I'd rip the hidden track before track 1?

anybody know how I activate the autodetection of the read command in the drive options dialog?

I found the autodetection thing but it didnt seem to do the trick

is it possible my computer is crap and just can't do it?
its a 1.8GHz Dell

When I re-burn to CD I would go through the trouble of making a separate track. Then I usually put a gap before the bonus tracks to separate them from the rest (10 to 15 sec or so).
When I just play the tracks with foobar, the DSP plug-in "skip silence" from Case takes away all the annoyance. (I use it with threshold 80 dB and minimum of 8 sec. so only those real annoyingly long silences are tackled). PS Put it before other DSPs.

Sorry but Tec9SD has already done it on Nov 30 2004, 11:57 PM...

Well, most of the drives use MMC1 so just give it a try or let it with autodetect read command in the appropriate field...

I can only suggest you to check out the EAC tutorials such as:

The Coaster Factory
Essential ripping guide
Radified Guide to Ripping CD audio & MP3 encoding [EAC + LAME]
EAC ripping & encoding tutorial

I hope it would be enough for you...

uh huh. after trying what he told me and it didn't work I asked if anybody would be willing to show me exactly how it was done.


thanks. these should be useful

to be clear, I'm not having problems using EAC to rip CDs, I just don't know how to rip the hidden track before track 1

ok, so I got the copy range part to sort of work

it extracted all the songs fine but the beginning 4:52 of the wav (the hidden track) is silent.

any thoughts?

It seems that your CD drive is not able to read properly lead-in...
I have 2 TEAC's (DVD reader & CD-RW burner) and although EAC reports that both of them are able to read lead-in only my DVD reader can extract the hidden track.
I think that your problem lies within this...

I hate to revive an old boring thread. But I can't sleep until I get this off my mind. It's a decent thread, it just starts repeating and rambling. Here's a pic to break up this discussion thread from 2004 to 2006.

New stuff starts now:
The discussion above... I already ran through that in my head. And then I remembered the LAZY way to do it back from my winamp days. The crossfading plugin/gap killer I used back then had silence detection (digital and analog). And as a side effect of killing gaps, it would also skip the silence common before hidden tracks.

Gee willikers that would be nice right now in Foobar2000.