mix

October 6, 2005 7:20 AM

I wanted to burn a CD with nice radio-style transitions between songs -- i.e., no "gaps." i'm using an iBook G4 and iTunes. Anyone know an easy way to do this? I assume I put all mp3s into some kind of mixer program, but does iTunes know how to do this?
posted by jgballard to Technology (9 answers total)

If you look in the iTunes preferences, you can set a zero-second gap between tracks on a burned CD. However, you can't do any crossfading.
posted by mikeh at 7:27 AM on October 6, 2005

You can do this with the burning program Jam (it's a relative of Toast that has more audio mixing/burning options). It's not free, though.
posted by bcwinters at 8:42 AM on October 6, 2005

I've heard good things about the software package "Toast With Jam;" you can also check VersionTracker to see if there's any shareware/freeware packages out there that will do the same thing.

Otherwise you're stuck with (in iTunes) keeping the gap to zero seconds and maybe fiddling with the start and end points of the track (right click on track, Get Info, it's in one of the tabs there).
posted by jtron at 8:43 AM on October 6, 2005

Not sure if this applies to Macs, but on a PC it would help to burn "disc at once."
posted by exogenous at 8:51 AM on October 6, 2005

Jam is an excellent program for doing this -- but as mentioned, it's not free. I have made a number of mix discs for weddings using it -- you can tightly customize the way each fade happens, and view the waveforms in order to beat-mix.

I think you would be able to do the crossfades (and customize them) using the open-source program Audacity, but I am not that familiar with it.

One other way would be to use AudioHijack or WireTap to record the output from iTunes (with the crossfade option set). But that way you would not have any track markers.
posted by omnidrew at 9:30 AM on October 6, 2005

You can do this for free with Panic's MP3 player Audion which lets you crossfade audio files and then export the resulting file.

Or you can also open up two versions of the Audion player and crossfade that way.
posted by jeremias at 9:44 AM on October 6, 2005

You could cheat... set iTunes to play with a crossfade, and use something like Wiretap to save the playlist as it plays and then burn that to the disc instead of doing it directly from iTunes.
posted by edd at 10:52 AM on October 6, 2005

You might also be interested in the (shareware) Ask the DJ, which does beat-matching.
posted by adamrice at 12:30 PM on October 6, 2005

Butting in here - are there any good and free options for XP?
posted by tr33hggr at 7:44 AM on October 7, 2005