So, I thought I was done with this whole Death Magnetic thing. But while reading articles on the Internet about the so-called ‘loudness war‘ I came across the news that the vinyl release doesn’t sound as bad as the CD. And this got me interested in looking around for a definitive version of the album again.

Now, since I had last looked, people had been getting busy. There were now several rips from Guitar Hero available, and various versions that had had some level of remastering done on them. After downloading a few, I settled on a version by a chap calling himself ‘eetfunk’ (The Pirate Bay has a torrent if anyone’s interested) as the version I liked the sound of best.

But the question of what to do about the solos in Suicide & Redemption remained. I had never been completely happy with the spliced version I had on my existing GH3 mix disc, so I decided to have a go at putting together a proper edited version that was as close to what was on the CD as possible (aside from the horrible distortion, of course).

After a few of hours’ poking and tweaking, I had managed to edit the two GH3 versions of the track into as exact a facsimile of the CD’s structure as I could. If you aren’t interested in exactly how it went together, skip the next two paragraphs.

The times here should work for any version derived from Covak’s original XBox 360 rips. For any other rips some adjustment may be needed. To start with, take the James-Hetfield-solo version of the track, and cut it off after 7mins 11.505s. Then take the Kirk-Hammet-solo version, copy everything from 06mins 24.949s onwards and paste it onto the freshly-trimmed JH version. This provides an extended version of the track, and you could stop here if you wanted to. However, to edit the track down to the album version, there’s some more to do yet.

First, we need to cut Kirk’s extended solo down to the version on the album, so delete everything from 7:40.685 to 7:58.111. Then do the same for James’s solo by deleting from 6:52.530 to 7:09.941. That’s the solos sorted. That just leaves the beginning and end, which begin sharply in Guitar Hero but fade in and out on the CD. The ending is pretty easy; just add a fade out between 9mins 38s and 10mins 1s, then replace everything after that with silence. The beginning is slightly more complicated. First fade in between the very start of the track and 21s. Then replace the first 6.7s with silence. Add another fade in between 6.7s and 6.9s. Finally, trim the first 6.44s away completely. Once that’s done, all that remains is to cut some silence off the end of the track to bring it to 9mins 57.720s, which is the same as the CD.

All of which means I finally have a version of this CD that I’m happy with. Hopefully now I can stop messing about with it and just enjoy it.