4 ms·

One less-secretive way I've seen pregaps used is for live recordings. The crowd noise betwixt songs can be contained in a pregap, so that it is only ever heard

by ssl-3 2y ago

One less-secretive way I've seen pregaps used is for live recordings. The crowd noise betwixt songs can be contained in a pregap, so that it is only ever heard when listening to the album straight-through (instead of in shuffle or track-program mode). --- Another fun feature of audio CDs is indexes. A disc can have 99 tracks, and each track can have some pregap (including track 1, as the article discusses). And each of these 99 tracks can be further subdivided with 99 index markers. This gives a CD the theoretical ability to have 9,801 selectable audio segments. Although realistically, I've only owned a couple of CD players that even displayed index numbers and exactly one CD player (a Carver TL-3300) that allowed a person to seek to a given index number within a track. (And I've only known one CD to actually make use of indexes in any useful manner, which was a sound effects CD from the early 1980s that had a lot more than 99 sounds on it -- all organized by tracks, and sub-organized by index marks. I just can't think of the name right now.)

cainxinth 2y ago
> Broken was re-released as one CD in October 1992, having the bonus songs heard on tracks 98 and 99 respectively, without any visual notice except for the credits, and tracks 7–97 each containing one second of silence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_(Nine_Inch_Nails_EP)#Packaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_(Nine_Inch_Nails_EP)#Pa... Amarok (1990) by Mike Oldfield is a single hourlong track with 53 index marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(Mike_Oldfield_album)#Track_listing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(Mike_Oldfield_album)#T...
- egypturnash 2y ago
  Broken was absolutely perfect to put into a multi-disc player along with TMBG's Apollo 18, which contains "Fingertips", a suite of 21 very short songs. Set it to shuffle songs from everything in the player, and enjoy your sonic whiplash
  - eyelidlessness 2y ago
    If you want sonic whiplash without so much effort, you can also listen to a Fantomas album in its original order.
    - tecleandor 2y ago
      This could be fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Music_for_Short_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Music_for_Short_People
    - egypturnash 2y ago
      There wasn't really much effort involved. Pick a few discs off the CD rack that I thought will clash interestingly, load up the cd tray of the cheap all-in-one turntable/tape deck/radio/cd unit I had in my room, hit the 'shuffle' button until it tells me it's gonna shuffle everything together, hit play. Looking Fantomas up on Wikipedia makes it sound like they'd go pretty well with "twenty tracks that sound like the choruses of twenty different songs" and "ninety-something 1s blank tracks plus a few industrial songs", though.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Was this better with the crazily fast-loading chonka-chonk slam-slam nature of a Pioneer 6-disc cartridge changer, or with something slower and perhaps more-civilized like a period-correct Technics 5-disc changer, with its nearly-silent and relatively exquisite, seemingly-careful demeanor? (Both have their merits, but I unfortunately have neither at hand. And I only have one of these 2 albums. And one of those albums is the original Broken, which only has 6+2 tracks across two discs instead of 99 tracks on one disc. And how do the 91 silent tracks on a more-common release of Broken affect things compared to the 26 musical tracks that the original 6+2+18 track-count ensemble may entail, in terms of inter-song delay or any other such thing on a real multi-disc changer? I know TMBG fairly well, and NIN very well, and I enjoy the fuck out of gear, but I have so many questions.) (I vaguely jest above, but Spotify only shows me 18 tracks on Apollo 18. And only one of them is Fingertips. Am I looking at this wrong?)
    - egypturnash 2y ago
      Presumably Spotify has glommed all the Fingertips into one file. On the original CD release it was twenty-one separate tracks; there was a bit in the liner notes that explicitly encouraged you to put it on shuffle. https://tmbw.net/wiki/Fingertips https://tmbw.net/wiki/Fingertips I could not tell you what brand the all-in-one turntable/radio/tape deck/cd player I had at the time was. There was a big tray with room for five CDs and I have absolutely no memory of how much noise it made when switching from one disc to another, and every physical object involved in this affair is long gone in a hurricane. I suspect both CDs should be easy to find used copies of, if you have the appropriate hardware and want to experience the tension of not knowing if the next song you hear is going to be Trent bitching, a brief moment of silence, a Fingertip, or whatever else you put in the player. Given my tastes at the time this would have probably been Skinny Puppy, Ozric Tentacles, and Björk, but do whatever feels like the most interesting possible choice; I have a disc lying around now that’s nothing but forty iterations of Satie’s Vexations and that would have certainly been a prime choice for this little game.
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        Here it is on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/1VdLQlGXMvaEUZIL9KuG35?si=29f4653979d54fde https://open.spotify.com/track/1VdLQlGXMvaEUZIL9KuG35?si=29f... In my location, it shows as a single track that is 4:33.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
My personal CD ripping script is configured to leave all pregaps after track one at the end of the preceding track when splitting them out as individual files. It gets ripped in one DAO pass for guaranteed preservation of all samples when using gapless playback on live recordings. Track navigation then works just like a real CD without having to listen to an incongruous section of audio meant to link the previous track on sequential play or, even worse, missing it altogether. I have a classical CD from the 80's with index marks for different movements within within the individual compositions represented by a handful of tracks. My understanding is that DG was the only publisher routinely using them. That required some manual intervention to convert the indices to separate tracks. Sony was pretty good about providing index nav. on their full size stereo players. At least until their perpetually cruddy remotes eventually failed.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  That's probably the best way to do it, given common toolsets and players. I also rip pregaps as lead-outs (rather than the lead-ins that the structure may appear to suggest). It's things like this that make me wish that we'd landed on on a good, popular way to store albums (with metadata!) instead of individual tracks -- or to at least reassemble individual tracks' files properly into whole albums without glitches and weirdness. (FLAC/cue can do some of this, but hardware player support is nearly nonexistant.) I've been told that this is a stupid thing to want, and I want it anyway. I'm old enough to remember listening to albums the whole way through by default since anything else would take extra steps, and perhaps fortunate-enough to have generally preferred listening to albums where that is a thing that is also worth doing intentionally. (And yet, I am young enough to still be bitter about Lars killing Napster. My dissatisfaction is multifaceted.)
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    In addition to lossy compressed track files I also generate a FLAC with embedded cue as a master copy of the original. It's useful for recreating the whole recording for mass editing. I have a few discs mastered with preemphasis that needed correction. I too hope there will be a day when all FLAC players support track navigation. The reality is the music album has had its day in the sun and will largely be a forgotten curiosity like the typewriter or rotary phone.
pseudosavant 2y ago
I mastered a CD in 2000 for a band that wanted a secret track at the end. I came up with a novel way to do it. There were a dozen regular tracks. A bunch of empty ones. And the final track over about a dozen tracks of varying length with no gap. Used all 99 tracks. I could only pull it off with this CD burning software that didn’t have a UI. It took a text file as input at the command line. But it could do everything from almost every color of spec (Red Book, Blue Book, etc) for CDs.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  I've had visions of putting a CD together that was that way, but with pregaps and indexes utilized as well. "WTF? The time counter keeps going forward, and then sometimes it goes backwards! And using the track seek buttons completely eliminates some parts that I can hear if I don't touch anything! It's a whole different song entirely when you program tracks 39, 40, and 52 in a loop, and IDFK what it is with this Index number that only always showed "1" before. Oh wait. Srsly? From tracks 71-93, it's using the index to count beats...and the track number to count measures? No, that can't be it. Except...."
  - pseudosavant 2y ago
    I thought I'd really (ab)used the CD specs, but don't recall ever trying indexes. Curious how most CD players, which only had a two-digit track indicator, handled indexes. I would have used that if I had known about it.
    - giobox 2y ago
      I wasn't aware these existed either. I suspect the answer is incredibly boring: most CD players simply wont seek to an index, pressing skip track will just skip to the next track ignoring any indexes present.
- chaboud 2y ago
  The Nine Inch Nails “Broken” EP had a couple of tracks at the end of 99, though the middle tracks were all 1-second blanks.
AkBKukU 2y ago
I'm curious if you have a specific example of an album with the crowd noise between tracks like that? I collect and rip hundreds of CDs and am always on the look out for edge case discs to further hone my tools. On your pregap + 99 indexes remark, the "pregap" is the space between index 00 and 01 which continues on up to index 99. Players seek to index 01 as the start point of the track. There is no separate pregap designation. I've paid special attention to this because it is a difficult problem to solve as many discs have space between tracks stored in index 00-01 but rarely is there anything audible in there after the first track. The only example I have of this is a specialty music sample disc, Rarefaction's A Poke In The Ear With A Sharp Stick, that has over 500 samples on the disc accessed by track + index positions. As a sidebar based on the later comments in the thread, I've made it a habit to rip and store every audio CD as BIN/CUE+TOC using cdrdao. This allows me to go back and re-process discs I may have missed something on. But that is imprecise even because it usually breaks bluebook discs with multiple sessions to store data due to absolute LBA addressing. Also the ways different CD/DVD drives handle reading data between index 00-01 on track 1 is maddening. Some will read it, some will error, and the worst is those that output fake blank data.
- hcs 2y ago
  Not sure why I didn't think to mention this before: One tool you might consider is redumper, it's designed in particular to handle multisession CDs, and it attempts to over-read into the disc lead-in and lead-out to catch data outside of the range covered in the TOC (particularly common in older CDs). It only outputs a final split bin+cue, but everything read, including scrambled data, toc, and subchannel/subcode, is saved for future processing. The bin+cue can be used with ISO Buster (and probably other tools) to access Enhanced CD filesystems. Feel free to reach out if you need some tips, this is what I use for my collection. https://github.com/superg/redumper/ https://github.com/superg/redumper/ Caveat: It is mostly intended for use with the low-level features of Plextor drives, so CD support on other drives is relatively limited; in particular it doesn't have any overlapping read paranoia-style features. The recommendation is to dump twice to confirm; it's running straight through without seeking so that's usually still quite fast.
- meindnoch 2y ago
davidgay 2y ago
I have an early CD (Bach's Goldberg variations, played by Glenn Gould) which is one track with 31 index markers. My (early) Philips CD player dealt with it fine, but since then it's been a bit of a problem...

by ssl-3 2y ago

cainxinth 2y ago

> Broken was re-released as one CD in October 1992, having the bonus songs heard on tracks 98 and 99 respectively, without any visual notice except for the credits, and tracks 7–97 each containing one second of silence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_(Nine_Inch_Nails_EP)#Packaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_(Nine_Inch_Nails_EP)#Pa... Amarok (1990) by Mike Oldfield is a single hourlong track with 53 index marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(Mike_Oldfield_album)#Track_listing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(Mike_Oldfield_album)#T...

egypturnash 2y ago
Broken was absolutely perfect to put into a multi-disc player along with TMBG's Apollo 18, which contains "Fingertips", a suite of 21 very short songs. Set it to shuffle songs from everything in the player, and enjoy your sonic whiplash
- eyelidlessness 2y ago
  If you want sonic whiplash without so much effort, you can also listen to a Fantomas album in its original order.
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    This could be fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Music_for_Short_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Music_for_Short_People
  - egypturnash 2y ago
    There wasn't really much effort involved. Pick a few discs off the CD rack that I thought will clash interestingly, load up the cd tray of the cheap all-in-one turntable/tape deck/radio/cd unit I had in my room, hit the 'shuffle' button until it tells me it's gonna shuffle everything together, hit play. Looking Fantomas up on Wikipedia makes it sound like they'd go pretty well with "twenty tracks that sound like the choruses of twenty different songs" and "ninety-something 1s blank tracks plus a few industrial songs", though.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Was this better with the crazily fast-loading chonka-chonk slam-slam nature of a Pioneer 6-disc cartridge changer, or with something slower and perhaps more-civilized like a period-correct Technics 5-disc changer, with its nearly-silent and relatively exquisite, seemingly-careful demeanor? (Both have their merits, but I unfortunately have neither at hand. And I only have one of these 2 albums. And one of those albums is the original Broken, which only has 6+2 tracks across two discs instead of 99 tracks on one disc. And how do the 91 silent tracks on a more-common release of Broken affect things compared to the 26 musical tracks that the original 6+2+18 track-count ensemble may entail, in terms of inter-song delay or any other such thing on a real multi-disc changer? I know TMBG fairly well, and NIN very well, and I enjoy the fuck out of gear, but I have so many questions.) (I vaguely jest above, but Spotify only shows me 18 tracks on Apollo 18. And only one of them is Fingertips. Am I looking at this wrong?)
  - egypturnash 2y ago
    Presumably Spotify has glommed all the Fingertips into one file. On the original CD release it was twenty-one separate tracks; there was a bit in the liner notes that explicitly encouraged you to put it on shuffle. https://tmbw.net/wiki/Fingertips https://tmbw.net/wiki/Fingertips I could not tell you what brand the all-in-one turntable/radio/tape deck/cd player I had at the time was. There was a big tray with room for five CDs and I have absolutely no memory of how much noise it made when switching from one disc to another, and every physical object involved in this affair is long gone in a hurricane. I suspect both CDs should be easy to find used copies of, if you have the appropriate hardware and want to experience the tension of not knowing if the next song you hear is going to be Trent bitching, a brief moment of silence, a Fingertip, or whatever else you put in the player. Given my tastes at the time this would have probably been Skinny Puppy, Ozric Tentacles, and Björk, but do whatever feels like the most interesting possible choice; I have a disc lying around now that’s nothing but forty iterations of Satie’s Vexations and that would have certainly been a prime choice for this little game.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      Here it is on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/1VdLQlGXMvaEUZIL9KuG35?si=29f4653979d54fde https://open.spotify.com/track/1VdLQlGXMvaEUZIL9KuG35?si=29f... In my location, it shows as a single track that is 4:33.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

My personal CD ripping script is configured to leave all pregaps after track one at the end of the preceding track when splitting them out as individual files. It gets ripped in one DAO pass for guaranteed preservation of all samples when using gapless playback on live recordings. Track navigation then works just like a real CD without having to listen to an incongruous section of audio meant to link the previous track on sequential play or, even worse, missing it altogether. I have a classical CD from the 80's with index marks for different movements within within the individual compositions represented by a handful of tracks. My understanding is that DG was the only publisher routinely using them. That required some manual intervention to convert the indices to separate tracks. Sony was pretty good about providing index nav. on their full size stereo players. At least until their perpetually cruddy remotes eventually failed.

ssl-3 2y ago
That's probably the best way to do it, given common toolsets and players. I also rip pregaps as lead-outs (rather than the lead-ins that the structure may appear to suggest). It's things like this that make me wish that we'd landed on on a good, popular way to store albums (with metadata!) instead of individual tracks -- or to at least reassemble individual tracks' files properly into whole albums without glitches and weirdness. (FLAC/cue can do some of this, but hardware player support is nearly nonexistant.) I've been told that this is a stupid thing to want, and I want it anyway. I'm old enough to remember listening to albums the whole way through by default since anything else would take extra steps, and perhaps fortunate-enough to have generally preferred listening to albums where that is a thing that is also worth doing intentionally. (And yet, I am young enough to still be bitter about Lars killing Napster. My dissatisfaction is multifaceted.)
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  In addition to lossy compressed track files I also generate a FLAC with embedded cue as a master copy of the original. It's useful for recreating the whole recording for mass editing. I have a few discs mastered with preemphasis that needed correction. I too hope there will be a day when all FLAC players support track navigation. The reality is the music album has had its day in the sun and will largely be a forgotten curiosity like the typewriter or rotary phone.

pseudosavant 2y ago

I mastered a CD in 2000 for a band that wanted a secret track at the end. I came up with a novel way to do it. There were a dozen regular tracks. A bunch of empty ones. And the final track over about a dozen tracks of varying length with no gap. Used all 99 tracks. I could only pull it off with this CD burning software that didn’t have a UI. It took a text file as input at the command line. But it could do everything from almost every color of spec (Red Book, Blue Book, etc) for CDs.

ssl-3 2y ago
I've had visions of putting a CD together that was that way, but with pregaps and indexes utilized as well. "WTF? The time counter keeps going forward, and then sometimes it goes backwards! And using the track seek buttons completely eliminates some parts that I can hear if I don't touch anything! It's a whole different song entirely when you program tracks 39, 40, and 52 in a loop, and IDFK what it is with this Index number that only always showed "1" before. Oh wait. Srsly? From tracks 71-93, it's using the index to count beats...and the track number to count measures? No, that can't be it. Except...."
- pseudosavant 2y ago
  I thought I'd really (ab)used the CD specs, but don't recall ever trying indexes. Curious how most CD players, which only had a two-digit track indicator, handled indexes. I would have used that if I had known about it.
  - giobox 2y ago
    I wasn't aware these existed either. I suspect the answer is incredibly boring: most CD players simply wont seek to an index, pressing skip track will just skip to the next track ignoring any indexes present.
chaboud 2y ago
The Nine Inch Nails “Broken” EP had a couple of tracks at the end of 99, though the middle tracks were all 1-second blanks.

AkBKukU 2y ago

I'm curious if you have a specific example of an album with the crowd noise between tracks like that? I collect and rip hundreds of CDs and am always on the look out for edge case discs to further hone my tools. On your pregap + 99 indexes remark, the "pregap" is the space between index 00 and 01 which continues on up to index 99. Players seek to index 01 as the start point of the track. There is no separate pregap designation. I've paid special attention to this because it is a difficult problem to solve as many discs have space between tracks stored in index 00-01 but rarely is there anything audible in there after the first track. The only example I have of this is a specialty music sample disc, Rarefaction's A Poke In The Ear With A Sharp Stick, that has over 500 samples on the disc accessed by track + index positions. As a sidebar based on the later comments in the thread, I've made it a habit to rip and store every audio CD as BIN/CUE+TOC using cdrdao. This allows me to go back and re-process discs I may have missed something on. But that is imprecise even because it usually breaks bluebook discs with multiple sessions to store data due to absolute LBA addressing. Also the ways different CD/DVD drives handle reading data between index 00-01 on track 1 is maddening. Some will read it, some will error, and the worst is those that output fake blank data.

hcs 2y ago
Not sure why I didn't think to mention this before: One tool you might consider is redumper, it's designed in particular to handle multisession CDs, and it attempts to over-read into the disc lead-in and lead-out to catch data outside of the range covered in the TOC (particularly common in older CDs). It only outputs a final split bin+cue, but everything read, including scrambled data, toc, and subchannel/subcode, is saved for future processing. The bin+cue can be used with ISO Buster (and probably other tools) to access Enhanced CD filesystems. Feel free to reach out if you need some tips, this is what I use for my collection. https://github.com/superg/redumper/ https://github.com/superg/redumper/ Caveat: It is mostly intended for use with the low-level features of Plextor drives, so CD support on other drives is relatively limited; in particular it doesn't have any overlapping read paranoia-style features. The recommendation is to dump twice to confirm; it's running straight through without seeking so that's usually still quite fast.
meindnoch 2y ago

davidgay 2y ago

I have an early CD (Bach's Goldberg variations, played by Glenn Gould) which is one track with 31 index markers. My (early) Philips CD player dealt with it fine, but since then it's been a bit of a problem...