It kind of failed if you had a fancy CD player (or CD-ROM drive) that could show the lengths of tracks, if every other song on an album is 3 minutes long, then the last one probably isn't 30 minutes long.
I don't know what the point of this post is, other than that it sucks when a modern release removes the hidden track 
i've got a few vinyl records that keep the hidden track on a different groove. the record will spin and spin instead of reaching the end and detaching the needle, so you need to manually lift the needle and drop it into the groove of the hidden track. makes for a more interactive hidden track listening experience
and i've heard of musicians who've put two concurrent grooves of vinyl, leaving the hidden tracks extra hidden
There's a band that had all their tracks on a serial so you'd get a different experience each time.
Along with this, I remember when I first started looking into non-radio music
and being shocked the first few times I was tricked by songs that actually have runtimes like that.I grew up with friends who were into prog. We would give them such a hard time over their 17 minute songs.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The worst part about this today is that modern streaming services could easily clean this up automatically but don't. It would be so easy
Yes, but if either song was a banger you were SOL for looping it. I'm looking at you SoaD!
I used to edit the MP3s to either take out the hidden tracks and play them as separate tracks, or if the ”hidden track” was just a bunch of noise, I'd remove it from the song
Remember that you could also rewind into the space before the first track!
311's Transistor was the one I remembered. Here are some others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hidden_in_the_pregap
Interesting, thanks for the info. I didn’t realize that was possible on a CD.
AFI - Very Proud of Ya
Pitchshifter - Infotainment?
Damn, these two albums had hidden tracks and I had no idea?
There would sometimes be hidden songs in the pregap between tracks too. That meant you had to hold the rewind button at the beginning of a song to hear it. Sometimes it was hidden behind track 1.
The only CD I remember having that did this was Factory Showroom by They Might Be Giants but apparently it happened a lot.
The most interesting hidden thing I've seen albums do is sometimes have computer programs. The Christian rock band Prodigal put audio on a hidden groove on their album Electric Eye. If you recorded that onto a cassette and loaded it into a commodore 64, it would display quotes from Einstein and Jesus.
The game CD for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had a hidden track you could only hear by popping it into an audio CD player
There were a bunch of
musicians putting Spectrum games on albums in the 80s. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/jul/07/video-games-on-vinyl-flexi-discs-zx-spectrum
As a kid I had Weird Al Yankovic's "Off the Deep End" and it had a hidden track at the end. It's a few seconds of a cacophony of random instruments, metallic screeching and Al himself screaming.
I found out about its existence the hard way when I dozed off while playing the CD. I got woken up by it, scared shitless and confused.
Edit: Found it. (CW: sudden loud noise)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
