Ripping Hidden Tracks and Partial Tracks From CDs

Normally when you rip a CD, you just rip whole tracks or albums. However, there are times when you might want to be a bit more selective about which bits of a track you rip. CDs aren't always mastered as "one song per track", hidden tracks and other playback inconsistencies don't really fit well with the "one song, one file" digital music approach.

So you might want to "fix" your CDs as you rip them to:

1. Save space - if you're storing at a constant bitrate, silence costs as much as music (not really a problem with variable bitrates), hidden tracks that you never listen to also don't have to live inside the final track and can be left off your iPod
2. Make playback easier by creating a "one track one song" version
3. Fix issues where song intros end up on previous tracks

This isn't an easy thing to do, it thankfully isn't an issue on most CDs, but if you absolutely want perfection from your digital music library...

Hidden Tracks

The most obvious scenario is the often-used "hidden track" at the end of some CDs. Nirvana's Nevermind is a classic example - the final 20-minute track contains not just the final 4-minute song ("Something In The Way"), but a long period of silence followed before the final droning noise of "Endless Nameless". So rather than ripping as-is, you might want to hack out the silence and have your ripped copy be 13 songs, with the "hidden" track not-so-hidden and the track times slightly more representative of what's going on.

Mastering Issues

Sometimes CDs play with where the index markers go (ever seen those negative timers?) so the intro to one song appears at the end of the previous track (random example: my two pressings of Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" disagree over which CD track the intro to the title track belongs in). Occasionally, CDs just make mistakes. It's nice to have the option of fixing things so they work better on a digital music jukebox.

Fixes

Thankfully, you don't have to live with your ripping software's initial assessment of how a CD is structured (and anyway, a CD is just a continuous piece of music with a load of index markers for where the tracks start and end). Listed below are a couple of strategies for fixing things, although you will have to make a note of the times of where stuff starts and ends if you want to tweak tracks using these approaches.

Partial Rips - Telling The Ripping Where The Tracks Are

One of CDex's killer features is the "extract partial track" option. You might have to do some finding of files and re-tagging them afterwards (files tend to get dumped, un-numbered, outside the artist/album folder you normally rip to), but you can bring up the "extract partial track" option, set where you want the track to start and end (which can be somewhere in another track!), and then go rip.

EAC has a similar "copy range" feature - see this post on EAC.

Audio Editing

You can always use an audio editing program (I recommend Audacity) to glue together or separate out tracks. You might have to do your editing with WAVs (in which case you'll have to re-tag afterwards). This is not really an option if you're ripping direct to MP3 (you'll be compressing, uncompressing for edit then re-compressing), but if you do keep a lossless copy around, there's no problem trimming things. You can always take those FLACs, edit them and re-save, and not lose any quality.