I was responsible for some of the first digital content ingestion for the world's record labels back in the late 90s, which was all based around trucks filled with retail CDs being fed into CD-ROM drives and an army of young folks grinding hundreds of track names into a database. (what happens when a truck full of East Asian CDs turns up? what about all those albums by Aphex Twin and Sigur Ros with untypeable names? https://www.treblezine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/aphex-... )
I love these hidden tracks to death, especially the two hidden pregap tracks on Ash's first album, but they caused me unending pain and suffering.
Not only are they an absolute nightmare to rip, often with more than one song per track (so the WAVs have to be edited), the names of the songs are often totally unknown, even to the record labels. What do you even number the things in the metadata?
Added to that, you nearly always didn't even know they were there, so the negative numbered tracks would fail to get ripped and all the other ones in between or at the end would get ripped in weird ways and confuse all the data folk.
I love these hidden tracks to death, especially the two hidden pregap tracks on Ash's first album, but they caused me unending pain and suffering.
Not only are they an absolute nightmare to rip, often with more than one song per track (so the WAVs have to be edited), the names of the songs are often totally unknown, even to the record labels. What do you even number the things in the metadata?
Added to that, you nearly always didn't even know they were there, so the negative numbered tracks would fail to get ripped and all the other ones in between or at the end would get ripped in weird ways and confuse all the data folk.
https://www.discogs.com/release/984235-Ash-1977
"Help, computer."