Silent but deadly!

Right oh, being able to rip CDs to MP3 or OGG has been a real god send when it comes to things like Bullsh*t tracks where you just don't rip them in the first place thus saving yourself the torture altogether. But beware artists have other ways to annoy you that circumvents ripping their CDs.

I have ripped a load of my albums to OGG files and have taken them to work so I can listen there. Although I don't have to put up with any more fookeen ballads there is still something which bugs the f*ck out of me.

SILENCE

Yep silence. Nothing. Absolute zip. I'm talking about tracks which have several minutes of silence in them. Your busy working away letting the music playu in the background and suddenly the music stops and your wondering wtf has happened to the tunes. You check your music player program (XMMS in my case ) and see it's still working. You faff with the sound settings and then check whether you can still read the directory where the tunes are. You have one more look at your music program and suddenly realise it's fine. It's just one of those stupid tracks with 10 minutes of silence in them.. The ones with a song at the start then a huge break before something that would be classified under Bullsh*t tracks if it were on a separate track are the worst.

One fine example is Smash by Offspring on the album Smash. Has the smash song as normal (good song actually) then it has a little outro in the style of the intro track Time to relax. Great the song's finished but then the next track on your music player playlist isn't starting yet!!! WTF is going on!? Silence... You wait and wait and wait ( or skip if your not in the middle of something ) but nothing comes out. For pretty much 5 minutes! there is proper silence. Not a single note or anything. After 5 minutes there's a clean guitar doing the riff to Come out and play with several variations. Does this for about 1 and a half minutes and just ends. What is the point. At least if they had it as a separate track then you just don't bother ripping it but when it's lumped onto a proper song it's just balls.

Heavy Metal isn't imune to it either. Nevermore are guilty of this as well with 2 of their albums The Politics of Ecstacy and Dreaming Neon Black. At the end of The Politics of Ecstacy you have a song called The Learning ( one of those FOOKEEN BALLADS, a 9 and a half minute one at that! ). When it finishes, guess what! SILENCE. More that 5 minutes of it!. All the wait for was just for a freaky noise track with a distorted version of the vocals from an earlier track from The Politics of Ecstacy. Not worth the wait.

When you've got a load of songs on a play list constantly looping it's a ball ache to faff around when you have 5 minutes of silence in a song. Just don't bother, make our lives easier.

An apropriate little quote from Smash by The Offspring.
Well, 'til next time. Ta ta...











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