EAC deleting leading & trailing silent blocks?

[karlbarron]

Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. I've just received my first iPod (4th gen, 40GB), although my evil girlfriend insists that I can't play with it until my birthday , in a couple of weeks time.

In the meantime I've started encoding my cds to mp3s using EAC/LAME in anticipation of the big event. I've heard that if I use the 'Delete leading and trailing silent blocks' whilst encoding then this may cause the tracks to skip when playing back on the iPod. Is this likely to happen?

Similarly, if I trim silences before and after tracks, using MP3trim, will this have any deleterious effects when playing back on the iPod?

Lastly, those annoying hidden tracks that appear at the end of some cds after 5 or 10 minutes silence... is there any way of 'breaking' these off and forming an individual track for them and losing the silence that preceded them?

[slicky]

I wouldn't bother with deleteing silent blocks in EAC - especially if it has the potential of make a track non-compliant for certain players/devices. I can't vouch for that one way or the other since I've never felt the need to set that option. You could always test it to see how it'll work with your gear though. Why exactly do you feel the need to trim? If it's to minimize file size then the benefit would be minimal in the extreme.

As for the hidden track issue (I hate, hate, hate when artists do this! Sara McLachlan, Poe, U2, etc..) there are indeed methods of doing this. I've never tried any of them myself, but a search of the forums here should turn up some solutions. Ideally I think it'd be best to split a lossless formated copy (WAV) and then encode. You'll likely have to manually add tag info for the song, but that's easy enough to do. Others here who've done this will chime in I'm sure.

Welcome to the lounge!

~slicky

[karlbarron]

Slicky,

It's just that the silence bugs me. With my old miniDisc player I'd trim the songs so that as soon as one stopped, the next would start... just the way I prefer it.

Thanks for the advice though... I'll think twice before using the trim option.

PS. What's a "bump" on this forum? You kids use some funny expressions!

[slicky]

As I understand it, and I could be wrong on this, iPods will have a gap between tracks no matter what. You can join tracks together (haven't done this myself) in order to get around this. Some albums have tracks that run from one to another seamlessly and the resulting gap makes for a jarring listen. Try searching for "joining tracks" to see what others have used to do this. It's good that you're trying to get all of this set before realizing it's an issue after having ripped your entire library.

bump(ing) is used by people to get a thread back to the top of a forum list so that it gets attention rather than sliding down the list into oblivion. Some sites frown on this a spamish, but most are okay with it. It's typically considered bad (n)etiquette to bump a post more than once a day or two.

~slicky

[kornchild2002]

WavePad is the program I use to cut the bonus songs out of the extended hidden tracks. You will need to rip to wav with EAC, open the wav with WavePad, then do the rest from there. You will then have to save the new song. For example: Korn had a "hidden" track at the end of "When Will This End" off their Take A Look In The Mirror album, the song was a Metallica cover of "One." So I made a wave file that was for "When Will This End (Short Edit)" and "One (Live)." Then you will have to use EAC to compress the wav songs and tag them yourself. The process isn't hard it is just time consuming.

"Bump" on the forums means that someone is "bumping" their thread to get more notice to it. Alot of times you see it if someone posts a question and 5 hours later the question is not answered.

Edit: I forgot to mention you can go to www.download.com and get WavePad for the PC.

[karlbarron]

Thanks for that... sounds like a good plan to me. Will give it a go when I eventually get through downloading all my Frank Sinatra cds... he didn't tend to hide hidden tracks at the end of his albums... "One for my baby, and an extra hidden one for the road!"

Cheers!

[left]

i use soundforge to edit the wavs that need editing.

[Code Monkey]

You can actually use EAC to do the WAV editing, it's what I do with the $%%$$%@%$#@$^@ hidden tracks that artists think are cute or something.