How To Generate Track 1 From Track 2

  

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A CD of silence. (Strictly not a CD of silence, of course, butaudio filesof silence which one can burn to a CD-R to make a CD of silence.)

The tracks are of 2, 4, 8, 16 & 32 seconds and 1, 2,4, 8, 16 & 32minutes duration so they can be combined using the play list feature ofanormal compact disk player to give any duration (in even numbers ofseconds)from 2 s to an hour (well, up to 1 h 4 min 2 s, to be pedantic).

Uses

  1. Novelty item: This is themain reason I made it. Surreal,silly or stupid depending on your sense of humour.
  2. Inserting blanks: Sometimesone wants gaps between tracks(for example so that one can run between a CD player & a dancefloor whenone is both dance teacher & DJ, as I have been at times, usingan audiosystem without a remote control) and to have a track break markerbetween thegap and music track (so that one can skip the blank if needed). To dothat,just insert one of these silent tracks between each music track beforerecording. I've had reports of these silent tracks being used forstyles as varied as folk dancing, clubbing, zumba & yoga.
  3. Shutting up an irritating jukebox:If one wants peace& quiet but someone else keeps playing CDs on a jukebox or a CDplayer towhich you have access, replace their CD with this one. It can similarlybe usedto shut up some irritating mobile telephones by converting a silenttrack to anMP3 and installing it as the ringtone.
  4. CD player noise test: It canbe used to test a CD player,amplifier & speakers for background noise. As there is no soundon therecording, any noise one hears from the system when playing this isnoise addedby the playing equipment.
  5. Practical joke: I had notintended it as a practical jokebut found that one of my friends to whom I gave a silent CD triedplaying it ina PC and assumed that the computer was failing when it gave no soundout(despite the CD being clearly labelled 'Silences'). He was going towaste timein a futile attempt to debug his music playing software.
  6. To silence a CD player when using it as anamplifier (e.g. converting a car CD player to aux-in): If one needs to use a CD player as a amplifier for an auxiliary input, such as from an MP3 player, but the amplifier only works with a CD playing then this can be used as a dummy CD to keep the CD player happy without producing unwanted sounds. (This use was invented by a reader of this site, Kane Zhu, who used it to fit an MP3 player to a car stereo system in addition to a CD player when the stereo's only external input was a dedicated CD player one. Years later another reader told me that my silent CDs had become widely used when modding car CD players to add aux-in.)
  7. To silence a smart phone when using it to output sound from apps:Several years later another reader similarly found that an iPhone wouldonly push sound from a satnav application to a car hands-free speaker system when it was playing music andhence used a silent track as the music.
  8. To silence noise cancelling headphones:Another reader told me that he had got noise cancelling headphones for quietness, not music, but found that they needed to be Bluetooth paired to an audio signal source to operate. Hence he likewise used a silent track from here.
  9. To see musicplayer program animations uninfluenced bymusic:Some music playing computer programs display decorative animations thatadapt to the music. To see what they look like when active butfree-running without music to control them, play a silent track. Somecan look very different to their normal appearance and may even be moreaesthetically pleasing.
  10. To skip musicplayer first track:A reader of this site reported a music player with a bug in its randomshuffle - it only shuffled after it started playing so the first trackwas always the same. The solution was to put a short silent track atthe start of the playlist to sacrificially take up that unwanted slotvirtually unnoticeably. (The reader left no return address so I can'tcredit them here.)
  11. As a random timer: The samereader used a random playlist of silent tracks plus an alarm track as asubstitute for a lost random timer of a board game.
  12. For timing theatre sound effects: A reader told me of using them in a theatre both to time sound effects.
  13. For timing: That reader also used them theatrically to prevent accidental running into the next manually timed sound effect on forgetting to press pause. It was particularly of use lest the sound effects system was accidentally left on during the interval.
  14. To keep track numbering through episode gaps: A reader wanted sequential numbering of a series of tracks but the series had gaps (combined episodes in their case). Filling the gaps with empty tracks caused some old iPods go wrong & overheat (!) but silent tracks worked.
  15. To keeping a Bluetooth speaker from going to sleep: Some speakers have time-outs which save power by turning the speaker off after a period with no audio playing over Bluetooth. This can be annoying (the reader who reported it was planning a wedding service which, of course, has talking sections). Playing silence over the Bluetooth link can keep some speakers from timing out.

Thanks to all the readers who have sent me new uses they found for the silent tracks! Only the first 5 were originally from me.

Track 1 And 2 Software

CD Limitations

If you burn the tracks to a audio CD formatted to play in anormal oldaudio CD player then there are 2 restrictions imposed by the originalCD spec:

  1. All tracks must be >=2 s long. Therefore the 1 ssecond track must beomitted. (I've included it in the download for completeness anywaythough.)
  2. Although one need not have gaps between the tracks on aCD, it doesrequire a 2 s gap before the first track. This will add about 2 s tothe totaltiming of silence when playing in a conventional CD player (but thespin-uptime adds to that as well).

Additionally I have come across (just) one CD player thatmistakenlyreported that the whole CD was of zero length. Maybe it tried toautomaticallyskip the silences!

CD Burning Advice

  • Set the gap between tracks to zero seconds.
  • Use 'Disk at once' mode rather than 'Track at once' mode(the former isprobably the default anyway on simple to use CD writing programsanyway) as thelatter does not support gaps between tracks of zero length.
  • Turn off any automatic volume equalising/maximisingfeature. I don't knowwhat will happen if your particular CD writing program tries tonormalise azero volume recording to maximum (zero divided by zero ismathematicallyindeterminate). It should spot the impossibility & so eitherskip thenormalisation or complain. However it might produce noise, might give aconstant DC offset (poor speakers!) or might crash if badly programmed.
  • Some CD burning software might not cope with a totally silent CD image. Problems have been reported with K3b (I have tested in version 2.0.2 & found the same problem). I have had success with Nero & ImgBurn on MS Windows and Brasero on Linux.
  • Burn to CD-R not CD-RW as some audio CD players(particular those madebefore CD-RW was invented, of course) cannot read CD-RW. CD-RW usesdyes thatchange colour reversibly whereas CD-R uses irreversibly burnt holeswhich aremuch more like the original CD stamped holes.

Track 1 And 2 Generator

If using the ready-made image rather than individual WAVs,then only the CD-R not CD-RW isrelevant as I have already done the rest in making the image.

Compressing Nothing

Silence losslessly compresses very well. However the commonfilecompression algorithms are not designed for pathological cases likethis (sixhundred million identical zero bytes!) so it needed two passes. Theoriginal646 MiB of WAV files compressed a thousand-fold to a 640 kiB.tar.gzfile.Compressing this again reduced it to a minuscule (by CD standards)3.55 kiB .tar.gz.gz file. This is anastounding 186 000to 1 compressionratiooverall.

Indeed it compresses better by lossless Gzip or PKzip thanby lossy MP3.At the lowest quality MP3 encoding that Apple iTunes player offers (16kibit/s mono), itcameto 3.7 MiB, over a thousand times what lossless compressioncan do. Although those MP3s can then be zip compressed (as the they mainly consist of justduplicate block headers), fully lossless is still smaller.Most audio players however would need lossless audio stored uncompressed & some don't evenhandle anything but the old de facto standard of MP3,I've included the MP3s here as downloads too.

Generate

Even better, the 663 MiB CD image compressed down to2.36 kiB, a 280 000to 1 compressionratio.

It is not often that one can download an hour long CD over a56 kibit/smodem in under half a second!

Warning

In trying to hear sound from this CD, one is likely to turnthe volume uphigh. Remember to turn it back down to a sensible level before laterplaying anormal CD.

How To Generate Track 1 From Track 2

Copyright Issue

I think it is okay for me to give away this silence for free(releasedunder Gnu Public Licence). There has been one notorious case of theestate ofJ. Cage suing M. Batt for selling a silent recording, Cage having beenan avantgarde composer who had previously published a famous silent piece.However itwas reported that the suing was because Batt had jokingly credited Cagewithjoint composership of the track without asking permission first& profitedfrom the publicity of that creditation without paying royalties. Thesuing wasnot merely because it was silent as the general concept of silences inperformances & broadcasts pre-dates both Cage & Batt. Anyway,it was eventually revealed to have been primarily a publicity stuntarranged between the two sides.

Furthermore, both Cage's & Batt's silences were bothbased on thespecific novelty of being 'performed' on classical musical instrumentswhereasthe silences downloadable here are purely computer generated (inSyntrilliumCool Edit) loads of zeros.

My actual inspiration for a joke silent recording came fromDavid Nobb's'The Return of Reginald Perrin' in 1977. In that humorous story, afictionalcompany included in its deliberately useless product range silent vinylrecordswith titles such as 'Trappist Monastery Chants' & 'Laryngitisfrom ManyLands'. It was twenty six years before I got around to making one!

Download

Download silent tracks:

  • All 12 individual tracks(1 s, 2 s,4 s, 8 s, 16 s, 32 s,1 min,2 min, 4 min, 8 min, 16 min& 32 min of silence) in WAV format:
    • With Gzip lossless compression for Linux: Silence.tar.gz.gz(just 4 kiB for an hour!).
    • With PKzip lossless compression for Microsoft Windows: Silence.zip.zip(just 4 kiB for an hour!).
  • Ready-made silent audio CD image format (suitable for burning from ImgBurn, Brasero, Nero or similar):
    • The image with Gzip lossless compression: SilentCd.tar.gz.gz(just 2 kiB for an hour!).
  • Table of contents & cover (with a blank white square as the cover art) for CD case inlay:
    • In PDF (ready to print) format: SilentCdTableOfContentsAndCover.pdf.
    • In MS Word 2k DOC (wordprocessor) format: SilentCdTableOfContentsAndCover.doc.
  • All the silent tracks in MP3 format:
    • Silent MP3s: SilenceMp3s.zip(22 kiB, 4 3.7 MiB unzipped).
  • Individual tracks under a minute long in MP3 format:
    • 1 s silence: Silence01s.mp3(4 kiB).
    • 2 s silence: Silence02s.mp3(5 kiB).
    • 4 s silence: Silence04s.mp3(7 kiB).
    • 8 s silence: Silence08s.mp3(11 kiB).
    • 16 s silence: Silence16s.mp3(18 kiB).
    • 32 s silence: Silence32s.mp3(34 kiB).
  • Individual tracks a minute or more long in MP3 format zipped:
    • 1 min silence: Silence01min.mp3.zip(0.7 kiB, 60 kiB unzipped).
    • 2 min silence: Silence02min.mp3.zip(1 kiB, 0.1 MiB unzipped).
    • 4 min silence: Silence04min.mp3.zip(1.5 kiB, 0.25 MiB unzipped).
    • 8 min silence: Silence08min.mp3.zip(3 kiB, 0.5 MiB unzipped).
    • 16 min silence: Silence16min.mp3.zip(5 kiB, 0.8 MiB unzipped).
    • 32 min silence: Silence32min.mp3.zip(9 kiB, 1.8 MiB unzipped).

By Andrew Hardwick.
Distributable under GPL orCC-by-sa freeware licences.
Silent tracks made 2003/8/01. Page written 2005/3/6. Updated2006/1/7, 2008/12/31, 2009/5/30, 2012/4/4, 2013/1/28, 2013/8/18, 2014/10/4, 2018/5/12, 2018/7/13, 2019/9/7 & 2020/12/15.
Available on-line at http://duramecho.com.