[Inkmo]

I've started the undertaking that I've been putting off of ripping all of my CDs now that I have a nifty little flash mp3 player. Anyways, I'm doing this right now, and I was wondering if any of you guys have a method for breaking off secret tracks (you know, the sort appended onto the end of five or so minutes of silence at the last listed track on an album). My current method is to rip the normal mp3s straight to 192kbps LAME in CDex and then rip a wav of the offending track with CDex and break it up and encode it to mp3 with Audacity. This method seem as solid to you as it does to me, or is there an easier way I can be doing this?

 

[Davey]

Seems like you could just rip all the tracks to mp3 and then use one of the many free mp3 splitters to take apart the long track. But not sure if any of them work perfectly for that use.

 

[Denim]

I've used EAC & LAME for MP3's, but haven't come across any silent tracks. If they are there, seems that Audacity would be the easiest method to eliminate the silence. What CD's have this problem? I'm currious if I have any and haven't seen the problem yet.

 

[Davey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Denim I've used EAC & LAME for MP3's, but haven't come across any silent tracks. If they are there, seems that Audacity would be the easiest method to eliminate the silence. What CD's have this problem? I'm currious if I have any and haven't seen the problem yet.

They aren't silent tracks, but two songs in the same track with silence between them. For awhile there it seemed like almost everyone was doing it. Literally thousands of examples. Just google "hidden track".

Although there are some examples like that first Mercury Rev CD that takes it to the extreme and uses all 99 tracks on the CD, putting the "bonus track", in this case the great "Car Wash Hair", in track 99. So there are about 90 tracks of silence in between the regular CD and the hidden track.

 

[Denim]

Thanks for the info, I had no idea they existed. Google showed me that I have at least a few CD's that are candidates.
Guess I'll be exploring this further this weekend

 

[Inkmo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Davey They aren't silent tracks, but two songs in the same track with silence between them. For awhile there it seemed like almost everyone was doing it. Literally thousands of examples. Just google "hidden track". Although there are some examples like that first Mercury Rev CD that takes it to the extreme and uses all 99 tracks on the CD, putting the "bonus track", in this case the great "Car Wash Hair", in track 99. So there are about 90 tracks of silence in between the regular CD and the hidden track.

Heh. Dang. I remember I thought my computer was broken when I ripped yerself is steam the first time. Even worse than 80 some-odd tracks of silence is breaking the last five minutes of the next to last song up into all those 4 second tracks... I didn't pay attention so it confused the hell out of me for a while when I would leave winamp on random and periodically hear about four seconds of 'very sleepy river'...

On another note.. what is the best program for bumping down the bitrate of an mp3 without reripping? I would use Audacity, but it's stupid about anything that doesn't have english character sets in the filename and ID3...

 

[BillC]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Inkmo On another note.. what is the best program for bumping down the bitrate of an mp3 without reripping? I would use Audacity, but it's stupid about anything that doesn't have english character sets in the filename and ID3...

I like dbPowerAmp (www.dbpoweramp.com) for conversions.