mp3s are great for compressing your music collection, but sometimes you'd like to listen to a live CD the whole way through (e.g. Nirvana Unplugged, or some classical album). Before iTunes2, listening to consecutive songs always had annoying interruptions of silence between songs (as the computer loads the next MP3 into ram and begins decoding). Lucky for us, Apple's engineers have a solution to this problem: just use iTunes2 to set the crossfade playback to 0 seconds. You can't just turn crossfading off, you must enable crossfading, and then set the slider to 0 seconds. It works great!
To set this, select Preferences -> Effects -> Crossfade Playback, and move the slider to "0".
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020116002112531