What do you do about hidden tracks?

[MeSue]

You know those hidden tracks at the end of the CD that are tacked on after the last song with a long gap of silence in between. Have any of you split these into separate files? I am thinking about doing it because it's annoying to have that long gap of silence when they come up. I can't think of any reason not to... except laziness. Thoughts?

[Khuli]

Mine are left hidden, but that's laziness as much preserving the original.

[moley6knipe]

I use dBpoweramp with the "Remove Hidden Track Silence" DSP installed. You'll never guess what that does :-)

Oh, and it'll let me rip my HTOA discs too.

[funkstar]

Like Khuli mine are still hidden because I'm lazy.

What does annoy me though is hidden tracks before the first track. I haven't ripped any of them, but I know I've got at least two CDs that contain them. Apparently my Plextor 12/10/32A can handle them, I just need to get those disks out of storage to play around with.

[Mike Meyer]

I voted for leaving them hidden but I had one case where I split it up. On one of my CD's I found out about a hidden track at the beginning of the CD so I split that out in order to hear it and gave it a track number of 0. Otherwise I just let them be because if you wait through the silence you'll eventually hear it. So, yeah, I'm lazy too.

[MeSue]

What does annoy me though is hidden tracks before the first track.

Ewww... that's just wrong!

[Mark Lanctot]

I'm sorry, but artist's intention or not, I refuse to sit through 13 minutes of silence (which is, if I recall correctly, the silence before the hidden track on Nirvana's Nevermind), so I split them. If the name of the hidden track is well-known I use that, otherwise I just name it "(hidden track)".

I also will sometimes trim songs that have a long gap of silence at the end, I have a couple of those.

[maggior]

13 minutes is just rediculous. I swear artists have done that just to say "hey look, our new CD is 74 min. long". Yeah right - 61 minutes plus 13 minutes of silence.

Tool did something creative where the last track is track 69. There are a bunch of 2 second tracks that lead up to it to increase the track number. I left those out when I ripped the CD :-).

[MeSue]

I'm thinking of making this my weekend project, but want to be sure I've fully thought it through. One issue is my files are all MP3 and re-ripping the tracks would turn it into a bigger project than I want to take on, so I'd like to avoid that. But I do want to be sure it can be done losslessly.

I was thinking of using the Media Editor that comes with J River Media Center, but I don't know if it can crop the files without re-encoding them. I have a question on their forum to try to find out, or I'll do a test. If not, it looks like MPTrim is a free tool that can do it without loss.
http://www.mptrim.com/

Wikipedia has a list of albums with hidden tracks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...a_hidden_track

I hope this silly practice ends soon. There's a Last.FM group for hidden track haters.
http://www.last.fm/group/I+hate+hidden+tracks

[Mark Lanctot]

I hope this silly practice ends soon. There's a Last.FM group for hidden track haters.
http://www.last.fm/group/I+hate+hidden+tracks

I don't mind the hidden track (some of them are good!), it's the interminable period of silence that precedes it. This practice seems no longer in fashion though, it was common in the early to mid-90s but is quite rare now.

I remember a friend of mine telling me about the Nirvana track back when the album was first released ("you gotta hold down the fast forward to get to it") and it seemed cool the first few times but then it just got to be a pain in the posterior. :-)