Two related questions:
1. When you rip music do you rip the entire CD or do you only rip selected tracks?
2. When you create playlists, the same question.
Why?
I am excluding classical music which is thematic in nature.
1. Whole albums. The hidden track thing can be a challenge and may require you to delete blank tracks (or edit trailing silence from a track).
One thing that I really dislike are reissues of truly classic rock albums that have a lot of crap added... interviews, live tracks, sometimes tracks recorded years earlier or later that have nothing to do with the album. I rip these, but I sometimes render them non-listenable (by changing the file extension) so that I can later reconstruct the CD or listen to the stuff if I really want to.
With Jazz album reissues, it's often just as bad, or worse. A lot of times they'll include alternate takes and false starts. If it's a classic album and the stuff comes at the end, then it's OK. But I've bought many albums where they'll sequence the alternate takes after the well-known one, so that if you listen to the whole album you may hear three versions of the same tune in succession.
2. I don't use playlists very much - generally I listen to whole albums or listen in some kind of random mode, usually within a genre. But isn't the whole point of creating playlists the ability to pick and choose individual tracks?
