If you’re like me, you hate the extra junk that some artists put at the beginning and end of tracks.

If you’re also like me you hate the “hidden track” that artists stick on to the end of their albums. Why should we deal with 10 minutes of silence before another song starts playing? Why not just make it a track on the album? Why is the hidden track always one of the best songs on the album? These are questions that used to keep me awake at night, but I can rest easier once I found out you can easily crop and edit songs in iTunes.

The solution is to take a track that has a hidden song, crop out the useless bit of silence and split it into two songs in iTunes.

1. Select the track you want to edit. I have chosen God Send Conspirator by Coheed and Cambria which has a total length of 13:46.

2. Figure out the stop time of the first song and then the start time of the hidden song. The first song in my example ends at 6:35. The second song, the hidden song, begins at 7:37.

3. Start by creating a version of the track with the first song. Right click the track, select Get Info -> Options. Hit the checkbox for stop time and enter in the stop time of the first track. In my example, I will input 6:35.

4. Now that you have defined your stop time, right click the track and select Create MP3 Version. This will make a copy of the track with the Start Time and Stop Time that you defined for the track. After this step you will have two copies of the track, one will be the original. The second will be the new track you created, which will have a shorter time.

5. Do the same for the hidden track, except this time define your start time.

6. Do some clean up. Rename the hidden track to something like, “Hidden Track” or Google it to find out what the actual name is supposed to be. I always delete the original track that contains the main song and the secret song. Also redo the track numbers to account for the fact that you now have 1 more track on the album.

In the screenshot below you can I see completed the following 1) split the track God Send Conspirator into two tracks 2) renamed the hidden track to IRO-bot 3) changed the track number to 11 to account for the fact I now have an additional track.

Excelsior!