Remeber those “hidden” tracks on CDs that became so popular in the ’90s? They were cool the first time you heard them, and then just got annoying. They’re even more annoying today when ripping these CDs to MP3s.

Generally, there are two kinds of hidden tracks. The first would put the hidden track on the 99th track with all the tracks in between as blank 1 second tracks. The other kind is where the last track is super long, like 30 minutes, with 25 minutes of silence between the final track and the hidden track. The first kind is easier to deal with, as you just don’t rip the 90 blank tracks in the middle. The second kind requires manual editing. I use Audacity to make two tracks from the one super long track, cutting out the silence. Of course, you want to do this editing on the original CD file prior to conversion to MP3. Otherwise you’ll end up ecoding the file twice, reducing the quality of the MP3.