I’m currently working my way back through my CD collection ripping everything that was previously ripped as .mp3s and replacing them with .flac files. Going relatively smoothly until I came to Ash’s “1977”. The hidden pre-track (both sides of an old single) is recognised as being present by the software I’m using (Exact Audio Copy) but cannot be ripped. I suppose I could play it and record it on another device, but I’d rather just rip it if that’s possible.
EAC shows that track 1 “Lose Control” starts at 5m38s (or thereabouts) on the disc and that there is a hidden track before it but it cannot “see” it to copy it.
I’m not especially bothered about the Ash album pre-track, but there are a few other albums that I’ll be ripping eventually where I’d like to rip the pre-tracks too.
Any ideas, anybody?
ATM: Digitising Hidden “Pre-Tracks” fom CDs. Anyone know how to do this?
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Is it possible to rip the whole cd as 1 track, then split it into individual tracks? You certainly could do that with mp3 software, as I vaguely remember doing this sort of thing ripping audiobooks.
I think Audacity is your friend, if it is fluent in flac. Aeons since I used it to digitise my LPs but you can split bits off at your pleasure/leisure.
Good question, as the only CD player in my house which would play pre-tracks was Mrs F’s Cambridge Audio CD4 (which we sold as it wasn’t being used).
I don’t know the answer myself, but I’ve asked some who might.
I’d be surprised if Foobar2000 doesn’t either support it natively or have a plugin.
dbpoweramp supports pre-tracks, apparently.
Yes it does. Thanks.
Downloaded to try it out.
Amazinlgy, Foobar2000 doesn’t suport pregaps.
CUERipper does (or at least that’s what the CUETools Wiki page says).
See http://cue.tools/wiki/CUETools
I thought I’d see if I could offer any help here, as i have a wide variety of CD/DVD reading/ripping software here, but when I checked my own copy of 1977, I can see no evidence of any hiddent racks at all – the start time of the first track is a couple of seconds from zero.
Presumably there are two different versions of the CD out there, one without any hidden tracks at the start.
My copy is an early one, on the Infectious Records label, serial no. INFECT40CDX
What other CDs did you have in mind that have hidden tracks at the start that you can’t access? Let me know and I’ll see if I can find a away to get at them.
Off the top of my head, Foxy, David Gray’s White Ladder has one.
Here’s a list of others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hidden_in_the_pregap
A few in that list that I have and was completely unaware of the pre-tracks.
Mention of “The Bar Steward Sons Of Val Doonican” made me chuckle. I wonder if they ever did T-shirts. Just the thing for jazz nights down the pub.
Yes, Pulp’s This Is Hardcore – I had no idea.
I saw The Bar Steward Sons Of Val Doonican at the Mean Fiddler. Another band I regularly saw there were The Funking Barstewards. Drink was taken at both.
Would have been disrespectful not to take drink at such gigs.
Michelle Shocked’s first two do.
According to Discogs.com there are several different versions of “1977”. The earliest single CD UK versions (INFECT40CD) have hidden tracks at the start and the end. Later versions (INFECT40CDX) don’t. There’s also a 3-CD Rhino Records reissue version with the pre-tracks as ordinary tracks along with a huge load of other stuff.
I’ll carry on having a play with this later today – I have a copy of This Is Hardcore, so that will be my guinea pig CD.
I know from experience that the limiting factor here may well be hardware rather than software however, as in the past I’ve sought out specific drive models to gain the ability to do stuff that exceeds or ignores the Orange Book spec – and not every DVD/CD-ROM/RAM drive will play ball in that respect. Plextor drives used to be the most co-operative for stuff like this, but I don’t know if that’s still the case.
The Afterdawn website used to be the go-to place for this kind of info, but it’s very much oriented around video rather than audio – there may be a similar source of gen that you could tap into for this task.
My house is full of plumbers and electricians at the moment, as the central heating is being completely re-vamped – and I’m reduced to typing this on my tablet using my mobile for an internet connection. Once I have juice again I’ll give it more time!
Just tested “White Ladder” with Wavelab which can’t see the hidden track.
Just installed and tried out the 21-day evaluation version of DBPoweramp (An Apple version is available) and it does indeed see pre-tracks and make them available (subject to the drive you’re using being able to read them). The drive in my Toshiba laptop can do it, so that’s good. A bit quicker to rip to FLAC than EAC is but that is of no particular importance to me. Artwork is automatically located and added in good resolution but this too is not that crucial to me.
Two niggling problems immediately arose:
Most seriously, it doesn’t recognise the existence of the network drive that I store all my music on, so I have to rip to the Windows default “Music” folder and then move the created album folders to where I want them afterwards. I suspect this is deliberate, because each installation is limited to just a single computer and the Family version they sell for up to 5 computers costs £20 more. The “Path” file requester for where the ripped files go does not recognise anything else on my network.
Less seriously, by default the tags for ripped hidden tracks have “(ability to rip depends on CD drive)” appended to the track title, which to my mind is a bit sloppy.
Not yet sure whether I want to pay £30 for the software. The free version is quite severely limited compared to the full version and apart from this one ability there appears to be nothing here that isn’t in EAC. Minor upgrades are apparently free once it’s registered (and paid for) but presumably major version upgrades require further payments.
FWIW I’ve been using dBpoweramp for years, as well as EAC, and I’ve found it pretty reliable. One of its strengths is the batch/music converter functionality, and be aware too that if you wish to use .shn files, you’ll need to have separate installations of both the 32bit and 64bit versions, as the latter won’t handle them.
If you are in the habit of grabbing obscure bootlegs, er, I mean, ROIOs, from the archive DOT org music archive, you’ll know that quite a few of the older ones are only available in .shn format.
Trader’s Little Helper is freeware and very good for batch converting .shn files to .wavs or directly to .flac.
My software of choice in this area is DBPoweramp and mp3tag. Just to prove I’m not a git, I pay for DBP and donate for mp3tag as they’re both great and don’t cost much. Dbp is very quick at multiple file conversions and I’ve never had to question the quality.
You can use mp3tag to clean up the tags and rename tracks. It’s excellent and free.
Isn’t EAC just the name of the software rather than a digital format per se?
Yes. EAC is quite slow compared to some, due to complex error-correction stuff. If you set it to re-read bad sectors and load a scratched CD, it can take hours!
EAC is an application with the snappy name Exact Audio Copy. When the post up the page a bit says ‘quicker to rip to FLAC than EAC’, it means that dBpoweramp – in default settings – is a little more speedy than EAC when creating .flac files from a CD.
As steve says, you can instruct EAC to go the extra mile for accuracy, and it will gleefully read a damaged disc over and over again in an attempt to ensure a completely accurate rip (i.e. one without any guesswork amongst the 1s and 0s). Most of the time, it’s fine to just leave things in their default settings, and if you do this, dBpoweramp will usually deliver your lossless files slightly faster than EAC will.
A friend says: “I’ve managed to do it with EAC. Have to use the right CD player and I think you have to type the negative start time into track 1.”
Sneaky. I like it.
My god. Why do they even do this?
Because they can…
See also hidden tracks at the end. I have a Nine Inch Nails EP with 5 or 6 tracks, followed by 90-odd silent tracks each a few seconds long, and two hidden tracks at the end. Guess which I ripped?
The CD Ripper part of DBPoweramp apparently can be set up to skip all the silent bits between the final listed track and the “secret” track/tracks, apparently. That looks to be useful.
For hidden tracks at the end, with a big silent gap after the “last” track before the “hidden” track starts, in the past I’ve just saved the tracks to .wav format on the hard drive, loaded the final one into Wavelab or Audacity and cut out the silent gap from the waveform display. I can then either burn a ‘car copy’ to CD-R or do the conversion to .flac from the hard disk .wav files.
That would be my approach, normally.
Apparently there are some CDs where there are up to 60 unlisted very short tracks of silence before the “actual” hidden track.
Phew, I thought my answer had been deemed silly boy…..
Not at all, but the hard part is getting the pre-gap track to rip in the first place!
Because I am very dull, I have tried it with my copy of David Gray’s ‘White Ladder’, which features 2 minute 1 second long pregap track ‘Through to Myself’.
My install of EAC (V1.0 Beta 3) shows the start time of the first track at 02:01 but doesn’t rip the pre-gap track. I tried ripping the CD in Image mode but EAC hung with a ‘Detecting pre-gap tracks’ message.
CueRipper (V2.1.4) did produce a WAV image of the whole CD, including the pregap track, and a Cue sheet. The Cue sheet shows track 1 as Please Forgive Me, starting at 00:00 and ending at 02:01. CueTools (V2.1.4), however, crashed when asked to create separate tracks from the Cue file & WAV.
So, for me, a combination of CueRipper (to rip the CD image) and Audacity (to edit the pregap track from the CD image) the seems to be the way to go.
In the spirit of full disclosure: I have a Pioneer BD-RW BDR-209D drive, and run Windows 7 Pro (64-bit) PC, and I am very dull.
And I should probably update some of my apps.
Most current version of EAC is v1.3, which was released in September 2016.
Don’t know CueRipper or CueTools.
Most recent version of Audacity is v2.3.2 which was released just this month. Downloading it as I type, as it seems I’m 2 versions behind the curve.
I kept my old version of EAC as it is able to rip “Copy-Protected” CDs (those ones with a triangle logo). EAC had that feature removed on later releases to keep the right side of the legal enforcer squad.
A Cue sheet is a just text file listing track name, number, and start and stop points. With a CD image and a Cue sheet, you can clone a CD. CueTools is freeware from http://cue.tools/wiki/Main_Page
Audacity is, like most open-source code, constantly having bugs fixed and new features added. Every time I use it, a new version has been released.
Yeah but @fentonsteve , there’s no mention of Dobly.
Wouldn’t it be easier to find the track on YouTube then use one of those Youtube to MP3 converters on the net?
You’ve already bought the CDs, so the artist has been paid for the content, so there are none of the “morally dubious” concerns about using them in this context (in my opinion anyway). Appreciate some may not be available, but I bet most are.
If you want as good sound quality as possible, then ripping from a YouTube clip’s sound (lossy-compressed) and then converting to (lossy-compressed) mp3 just doesn’t fit the bill. Unless it’s something that’s just not available at all anywhere but YouTube.
Sadly You Tube is sometimes the only place you can get hold of things. Rossmore Road by Barry Andrews for example. Unless someone somewhere knows different…