Just recently happened to me. I’ve had Rascall Flatts’ latest cd for over a year now, having just found out their single “Sarabeth” is about five minutes after their last track.
In iTunes, there’s a setting for each file that allows you to specify the start and end times on the track. I once made a quick and dirty solution to the problem of extended silence/hidden track by importing the song twice, and manually setting them so that only the music played. Kinda wasteful of space, but who doesn’t have HD space to spare these days?
(I did figure out how to edit out the empty space and split off the hidden track eventually…)
Stand alone CD players run Windows?
I remember when Def Leppard released The Vault in the early or mid 90’s, they had a version of Miss You in a Heartbeat that was just Joe Elliott signing with a piano as the only music. To this day it’s far and away my favorite rock ballad.
After the last track, you had to hold the fast-forward button to skip the 14 (I think) minutes of silence to get to it. Now, I realize that to many people popping a CD into your computer is the norm, but that wasn’t always so.
Holy shit, at 32 I sound like the stereotypical old fart. People don’t understand how rapidly technology has advanced in the last 10 years. But I digress.
The point is, the “hidden track” was “innovative” and a “reward” to listening to a CD until it ended. Even if you were the first to “find” it, it just showed that you didn’t have the sense to play another CD after 5 minutes of silence coming from your speakers. We couldn’t edit this shit.
The fact that there are still hidden files that are posted to message boards 9 seconds after a release shows how out of touch the PTB in the recoding industry are.
Sad really. If I buy a CD, I expect the content to be listed. If they want to break that rule, I’ll follow my own. Either way, I get the music.
I must be incredibly naive. I still think hidden tracks are cool.
Yes - the runout track on the LP had a repeating loop in it.
I’m with jackelope.
“Secret song …
You’re the secretest song on the album
secret song…”
I don’t play music on my computer. I play it on the CD player. If I have a CD that has a huge chunck of dead air, I will never hear what comes after that. I had no idea this was common. I better go check all my CDs. What a fucking waste!
Anyone purchase a CD to listen to a long silent gap? A long silent gap on a CD is no more than a deliberate defect. Immature embuggerance.
Probably not, but they usually don’t have .wav editors either.
Clearly not everyone scours the message boards online after buying a CD, otherwise everyone in this thread who recently discovered a “hidden” track would’ve already known about it. I usually do, since the first thing I do when I open a new CD is to put it in my computer and rip it. It’s kind of hard not to notice when the last track is 20:00 but the song is only 4:30.
NIN ‘Broken’ EP
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/samples/B000001Y5J/ref=dp_tracks_all_1/002-3071329-8056053?_encoding=UTF8#disc_1
6 songs tracks, then blank tracks until the “hidden” songs on tracks 98 and 99.
One on my favorite NIN discs musically, but that shit is annoying.
“Weird Al” Yankovic’s Off the Deep End does the same thing, with the long silence and then the loud awful noises. It’s parodying Nirvana’s Nevermind, and I wonder if any car crashes have been caused by it.
For those having problems with mp3 files, there’s a freeware program called mp3DirectCut that’s pretty good for cutting out unwanted bits.
I’m glad I was on top of this one - a limited number of the original run was released with the first six songs on one cd and the other two on a 3" bonus disc.
This thread has definitely gone in a Cafe Society direction. Let’s move it there.
Abbey Road*; about 20 seconds after “The End” you get “Her Majesty,” which was cut from the middle of the side-two medley, then later taped on to the end, by a recording engineer, with a pretty good chunk of blank tape in front of it. The Beatles never said anything about it, and it was kept on the album that way.
I knew about that. I was referring to the original Sgt. Peppers album, which would loop the end of A Day in the Life infinitely until you took the needle off the record.
It should also be noted that although it was originally a hidden track, Her Majesty is now listed on the track listing of Abbey Road.
Droolian? Somehow I don’t think we’re in the Pit anymore.
The first time I noticed this (Good heavens, this will date me. Date me as being a young’un, but in my defense, I didn’t purchase music of any kind until high school) I was listening to Jagged Little Pill. I’d put the CD on while I was cleaning my room and didn’t really pay attention when it went off; I was busy with something or other. And then, a few minutes later, I hear this… voice? Music? Singing, or talking?
I’d never even HEARD of hidden tracks before. I thought this was majorly cool.
I hadn’t heard of any recent CDs that do it, though. You can’t really blame people decades ago for not thinking of the MP3 player… 
I have a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy CD from 2004 with a hidden track at the end. Not hidden very well, thanks to Gracenote.