How to Access Hidden Song 'Closer' from Dido's 'Life for Rent' (ref#VQLK4O)

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Describe the issue

How to See And Play A "HIDDEN" Song in a CD Track. See the Wikipedia Entry for Dido - Life for Rent for the track list. The last track on the CD contains the song "See the Sun" and also, after about two minutes of noise and silence, a second, hidden song "Closer".

Short of using a WAV editor to split that track file into two separate files with one song in each, is there a way to have Roon see the second song and include it in the track list? If I do split it, will Roon pick up the metadata for the last song?

Is there a way of getting rid of the two minutes of noise between the songs?

Describe your network setup

N/A

You’d have to edit and split the file.

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As far as I know you are going to have to manually split the track. Otherwise as you have found you end up with a very annoying final track with a lengthy period of silence where there is a hidden track. I have dozens of albums like this over the years. There are various feature requests going back years to handle this scenario in a better way. It is especially annoying in shuffles, playlists and radio.

I use dbPoweramp to recover hidden tracks and get rid of annoying lengthy track silence but it is a semi-manual process.

You need to use the “trim” DSP effect twice. Once to trim the back of the track, and once to trim the front of the track so that you end up with two tracks. The track duration calculations you will need to do manually and you will probably need to experiment a few times to get the fade ins/fade outs right. You will then need to make sure that your two new files have the same filename as the rest of your album, that the track numbers are consecutive etc. etc. so roon will treat the two new tracks as part of your album

It is very hit and miss if roon has the metadata for the hidden track. Usually I add it manually but in the case of this Dido album roon probably does have the metadata, but it depends on exactly what version of the album you have. Roon has 12 versions of this album so do a manual identification and associate it with the version 2. As you can see I have a different version than you and I have to match it to version 1 so that I do not get a metadata mismatch:

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In ban hidden tracks 0 and if they are at the end and start with silence. This prevents it from being picked by shuffle, etc., and it’s left out when playing the album, too - which is fine for me because it’s not really a part of the album proper, anyway. You can still choose to play it explicitly.

Doesn’t help with your example though

I’d say that, if this is what they released, this is what you should listen to, even if it was an error. You have to earn it to discover hidden stuff.

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Yep, IMO, that’s how it should be. In the following instance, I think the silence was intended.

Yes. The nuclear option is just to radio ban, hide or even delete tracks with hidden tracks. I probably do that in 90% or more of cases. Its a lot of trouble to split tracks unless its an artist I play a lot so I may never get round to it. This is also a perfectly viable and reasonable and (helpful) option if the OP rarely uses roon to play albums through. You may prefer to use CD players and other analogue systems for that and want to use roon to play in ways you cannot with those systems. That is certainly my case but if you fall into this category you may also find it beyond annoying if there is a lengthy silence in a playlist, shuffle or radio stream and you are in another zone or part of the house or even in the garden and cannot be sure if it is just roon flaking out again or there is a hidden track. A lot of this is going to depend on how you use roon or what your personal experience of roon’s stability is.

I don’t find that to be the case at all. Using Audacity, it is pretty quick. From start to finish no more than a minute or two, including editing metadata.

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Then it sounds like Audacity has a more complete environment for this task than dbPowerAmp and may suit the OP better. No doubt there are other tools. I only use dbPowerAmp because I use it for other tasks and have a licence.

Audacity is free and open source software. Takes a bit to learn how to do it but it’s reasonably easy and well documented

I use both, especially since Audacity is free. If you’ve never used it, loading the song into Audacity provide left/right channel waveforms which can be zoomed in on sections. So it is just a matter of highlighting the song until silence begins, then save as, then highlighting the hidden song and then save as. The silence is excluded by default. Bring up mp3tag change track number and title, done.

I save the original track is a different location of stored pre-edited tracks, so if I ever need to go back I can do so quickly.

The time consuming thing I find with dbPowerAmp is the absence of a waveform analyser so I usually end up using foobar for that and transferring the timings over. Unless I have missed something in dbPowerAmp? Thanks for the Audacity tip.

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