[Nick Zwar]

I just thought I check the longest and the shortest tracks in my collection, and there are indeed quite a few very short tracks.

Apart from some super-brief, under one second sound effects, the first “official” music tracks are still very short… the shortest is actually from Mozart’s DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE (conducted by Karl Böhm) which is only 2 seconds long! (There are also some very short cues by Roy Budd, Fred Steiner, Bernard Herrmann etc… that are just 3-6 seconds long). The longest tracks I have tend to be some albums that came with “continuous tracks (like Jean Michel Jarre, Electronica 2:The Heard of Noise (1:14:15), or long one track compositions, like Pierre Boulez’ Dérives 2 (50:40).

I suspect most of us with larger collections will have many very short and some very long tracks, and so far, it seems most collections will have an average track length between 3-4 minutes.