Mixed Up

January 17, 2004

As far as I've known, mixed music compilations and digital music players like the iPod never really got along, until now. The staple of the electronic music scene, the mixed music compilation had been largely crippled by the advent of the file sharing and digital music player revolution.

You see; digital music players no matter how good always inserted a small silent gap in between songs, even if there was none in the mix. I assume the reason was that no matter how fast the player was at locating the separate file songs in its memory the device would never be able to put two tracks back to back seamlessly. Even desktop computers with more powerful processing power sometimes chug in between songs. A mixed music compilation master piece such as Ritchie Hawtin's DX, EFX & 909 which packs 38 tracks layered in a little over an hour gets shredded to pieces because of such silent gaps.

There has always been however, a workaround. To open the actual music files in a wave editor such as Sound Forge and join the individual tracks by hand. Realistically, for someone with a considerable mixed music collection it has never been a practical solution.

Enter iTunes two days ago. Dabbling around iTunes' menus I found the "Join CD tracks" option, which takes all tracks from a CD and will turn them into one long file, a file that any digital music player- regardless of quality- will play the original mix as intended.