Tuesday, July 17, 2007

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Social Distortion's Live At The Roxy is one of my favorite live albums. Unfortunately, when I played it on the iPod, I found a glaring pause between songs as the album moved from one song to the next.

It's a classic problem that plagues portable audio players, but we've got a way around it in both iTunes and the iPod.

iTunes: Crossfade Playback

I didn't notice those gaps between the tracks when I played the live album in iTunes on my PC because it was set to crossfade playback.

Crossfade playback acts like a DJ, and blends the songs in your playlist together trunk to tail.

To turn on crossfade playback in iTunes:

Select File.

Select Preferences.

Click on the Audio tab, and select "crossfade playback."

You can customize how long the songs overlap, from 0 to 12 seconds. (The latter can be a bit much for anything but dance music with similar beats, while 0 seconds works well to string together songs without a pause in between.)

iPod: Join CD Tracks

Unfortunately, crossfade playback won't eliminate the pause between songs when they're playing on your iPod. There's only one known cure for that, joining your CD tracks, and it's a tad extreme.

First, it can only be done when you rip an album.

Second, it combines all the songs you select into one giant track. (A 1 hour 16 minutes and 41 second track for our Social D album.)

That means if it turns up in Shuffle mode, you're going to have one long listen before the next track comes up!

To join CD tracks:

Load the CD for the album and select it in iTunes.

Click the top of the first column so that the blue triangle points up and the songs are in order from first to last.

Select two or more songs that are next to each other.

Select Advanced > join CD tracks.

Click the Import button to add the songs.

But What If You Want To Shuffle Songs?

Want to have a joined album and still be able to play individual tracks? Rename the file with the joined album in it, or move the giant track into another folder, then rip the album again without joining the tracks. Voila: separate tracks for your mixes and the entire album without pauses.


http://ipod-playlist.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=23