I’ve noticed that a lot of bands, usually in the last track on a CD, include a very long segment of silence at the end of a normal-length song, and then (after maybe fifteen minutes of nothingness) include some more music at the end.
I don’t know what the logic is behind this, but it’s damn annoying. I’m forced to stop whatever I’m doing and fiddle with whatever hardware is playing the music to bypass the pointless silence. Sometimes, if I just have music on in the background, I don’t even notice that it’s stopped, and then am surprised when the music starts again.
Are they trying to be cute or something, by hiding content way at the end of the track for people to discover? Stop already, you’re not being clever or unique, you’re just irritating me! If I wanted silence, I’d turn off the player!
Nothing new about fooling around, putting music where you don’t expect it. And that Wikipedia article is woefully inadequate, but I can’t be bothered just now, maybe somebody else will…
I remember the Ash album, where you had to take the CD back from 0’0" to get the hidden tracks. Except it didn’t always work :S (a forerunner of Digital Copyright Paranoia?..)
God, it’s so annoying. I can understand the second-to-last track having a lot of silence at the end, making the desired effect if one is listening to the album through, but it drives me off the wall when a song doesn’t have a track to call its own.
Grrr, this drives me NUTS every time I listen to Odelay by Beck. Not only is there this long silence (annoying in and of itself, but not terrible), then there’s this noise that’s a mixture between nails on a chalkboards and brakes on a car going bad. And it isn’t like on Dookie by Green Day where the song is mastered pretty low. That shit is LOUD. Good lord, it makes me jump every freakin’ time!
Back in the vinyl days, I had an album by Hayzee Fantayzee that was purposely designed to skip at the end so it would go on forever, and ever, and ever… until you manually lifted the needle away.
I was thinking the same thing. (Hint: If you use Windows, you have one.)
The other day my girlfriend was sitting at my computer going through my mp3 files and discovered a piano ballad version of one of her favorite songs. She asked me where I got it, and I told her it was on the CD, about 15 minutes after the last song. She had never noticed that before.
Makes me wonder how anyone is not supposed to see it. I mean, if you play it on Windows Media Player, iTunes, Real Player, Quicktime, or any other media player, you should see that the last track is 15-20 minutes longer than the last song. Your loss if you don’t notice it. I find that it’s usually one of the better songs on the album.
Will Oldham does that on one of his CDs. I kinda think they just made a mistake when they put it together. I dunno. I don’t sense that there’s some artistic meaning to it. FTR, it’s just at the end of a song in the middle of the CD, not at the end or anything.
It sucks because I can’t put it on mixed CDs unless I open the track in SoundForge or something. I’m too lazy for that.
On the album Undertow, Tool has a “hidden” track at song number 69, and there are only about a dozen songs on the CD, so there are approximately 57 several second long “songs” in between… but even worse than silence, they’re a high pitched whine.
Not so bad on the CD, but it sucked on the tape. At least they did it that way and didn’t just make the penultimate song 20 minutes long.
