Why is there intro/outro silence in songs?
 

So why was the Chillout Lounge forum closed and deleted? This type of question is prime candidate for said forum. WTF?

Anyway, just a random question I was wondering and was hoping some of you had an answer to why a lot of songs on CDs or whatever have moments of silence before and after the song, maybe a couple seconds, whatever. I know that sometimes songs were meant to be recorded one right after the other and it just sounds better with the fade out and fade in (for example, the Metallica S&M CDs).

It bugs me, especially when I'm driving in my car and have a mix CD and it shuffles to the next song but doesn't play right away (actually it does play right away, but there are those seconds of silence before the track) or the previous song takes a while to end before going to the next song (because it has like 3 seconds after it fades out of pure silence), which is probably most noticeable in Winamp since there is no lag between playing songs.

Almost all the music I get now I edit so that almost all the silence is taken out from the beginning and ending of the songs. I've got some random .mp3 and convert it to .wav and plug it into Sonic Foundry and zoom in to where the first and end sounds are and delete the silence before and after them, then I just re-encode it back to .mp3 using Exact Audio Copy. I keep the original .iso and encodings in an archival folder just for fun.

I'm not sure if you're talking about slow intros into songs (sup Mars Volta), where the song gradually fades in, or if (more likely), you mean the 2 second pause between tracks.

IIRC, the original purpose was because in the early days, CD Players/Stero CD Players didn't have any sort of crossfade/seemless track feature, and only when CDs got super popular did they start adding that in. Of course now with mp3 playlists and no silence between songs on portable music players that limitation is pretty much gone. It may just be a vestige of the old days. One theory I have is that for Cassette tapes (possibly), the silence between songs was to subtily indicate a change of song.

Any Audiophilles care to correct/build on my hypothesis?

Not being an audiophile in even the slightest sense, I can't find fault with your statement.

I generally don't mind the silence gap in songs, however there are a few songs that I've listened to which have a 10-20 second starting and/or ending silence gap. It does get a bit annoying, but I've grown used to it. I must say, I'm very grateful for these gaps, seeing as if there was no silence in songs, when I play songs in succession it would sound rather...er...frantic?

Im only commenting in this thread to mourn the loss of the Chillout Lounge. Farewell sweet prince.

Also, Im with muzza. I think the silence helps give each song closure, instead of feeling like one long track.

I agree with Akira. On a lot of albums, tracks blend into one another because the songs are linked thematically. Conversely, a few seconds of silence in the beginning and end can help to establish a track as its own statement or idea. Also, since most albums have songs written in a variety of keys, the silence can help smooth the transition between songs in distant keys by cleansing your ears, so to speak, of the key of the previous song.

But the silence can definitely be a pain when making a mix CD or something like that. I was toying with the idea of making a CD for the GFF CD exchange, and one track I was thinking about using had about eight seconds of silence at the end of it that killed the momentum I was trying to build.

Sometimes songs have one or few seconds of dead air to separate songs, so they don't sound messed up when you shuffle them. Most songs usually should have a pause, so if you shuffle the songs, they have that pause to help differentiate between the songs. Other songs that were never really meant to be played out of order (listen to Paul Oakenfold's Transport), don't have the pause to make the music flow continuously.

Edit: Starslight beat me to it.