Seamless Ipod Playlists
So now that I kind of have a decent playlist, I decided to ‘kick it up’ a little bit, by eliminating the annoying gaps between the songs — of course Itunes can do this automatically, just switch on ‘crossfade between tracks’ & ‘gapless playback’ and you’re all set, but sadly this seemingly obvious feature isn’t available once you move your playlists to your my ipod [I realize the new ipods CAN play gapless - but NOT cross-fading].
I could have burned my playlist to a CD and then re-imported it back into itunes, but that seemed so analog — I chose instead to use Audio-Hijack by the folks at Rogue Amoeba - essentially it evesdrops on iTunes audio output (actually any application you specify) and writes it to a audio file (it has a bunch of other features as well) - So Itunes did all the crossfades, Audio Hijack handled the capture and output and bam. I didn’t have to do anything - import the resulting audio back into iTunes sync my ipod and your good to go!
Note: As a proof of concept I did this with the demo version of Audio Hijack, it overlays noise over your tracks longer than 10 minutes - to workaround this [I’m ashamed to admit this, I burned out the playlist in 8 minute chunks - and reassembled them in quicktime player] But in all seriousness, now that I know this technique works unattended, I’ll be ponying up the $16.00 for a licensed copy of Audio Hijack.