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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files Apps
So you have Pink Floyd's The Wall and you want to play it without any pauses between songs. What do you do? You have iTunes copy the album as a single track. That's great, but what if you just want to listed to Comfortably Numb? You have to fast forward to the beginning of that song and stop it when you get to the end of the song. Or do you?

Here's what you do. Go ahead and rip the CD as a single file. Now open that file in QuickTime Player and go to File -> Save As. Now be sure to "Save normally." Don't worry about the .mov extention because iTunes will accept it. This way you get a separate file that is only about 3k. Now copy that file so that you have a copy for each song on the disc (just option-drag inside the same folder). For The Wall, you would want to have the original mp3 plus 13 mov files. You might want to rename the mov files to match the song names.

Now you will drag the mov files to your iTunes library. In iTunes, you will play the full track and take note of where each song begins. Obviously, track 1 begins at 0:00 and track 2 begins at 3:00 (for example), and track 3 begins at 6:35, and so on. Now, select all of the mov files in iTunes and get info on them. For each track, you will fill in the necessary info fields and in the Options tab, you will fill in the start time and stop time for each song. So, for track one you leave the start time at 0:00 and the end time will be 3:00 (the start of the next track). The second track will have the start time of 3:00 and an end time of 6:35 (again, the start of the next track), and so on.

Now whenever you want to listen to the entire album you can play the originally ripped mp3 and you will be able to listen to it without any interruption between songs (those interruptions are a real buzz kill). And if you want to listen to Waiting For The Worms, you can play just that one song without having to fast forward. You can also put the songs into a playlist and randomly shuffle them.

I have QuickTime Pro, so I don't know if this will work with the free player, but I suspect it will. However, I do not know if you will be able to burn the .mov files onto a CD. You might, but you would probably have to do it directly from iTunes since Toast probably won't recognize the start and stop tags.

Yeah, I know this is sort of a long process, but you just have to do it once for each CD and it will save you some hassle in the long run. So there you go.
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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: GORDYmac on Jun 25, '04 10:28:15AM

Will the iPod recognize QuickTime's reference movie files?



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: chutem on Jun 25, '04 10:44:23AM

I think an easier way to get the same effect is to move the crossfade playback slider to 0. When I do this my separate tracks run into the next, like they do on PFTW. My other tracks normally have a fade at the end anyway so these play the same as on the disc as well. Less complicated and time consuming and has the same effect as this hint (at least on everything I have tested). The default is set to like 6 seconds which results in a longish delay between tracks.



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Create multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: Harry Tuttle on Jun 25, '04 11:21:01AM

Unfortunately a cross-fade with 0 seconds doesn't always work properly - you often end up with a slight rhythmic hiccup between the two tracks.

The problem is caused by the fact that MP3 and AAC formats only deal with complete blocks of music in their compression techniques. Most tracks do not use up the whole of the last block, so you're left with a tiny gap of sound at the end of the track. This is why you hear something like a pop sound if cross-fade is turned off. Ogg format, in contrast, doesn't suffer from this problem, but unfortunately it's not a native format for iTunes or iPod.

I had hopes that Apple Lossless format would address this issue, but it too has hiccups between tracks. Now it is possible that the reason for this isn't the Apple Lossless format itself but iTunes' playback adding in a slight delay between two files, but I expect it's the format.



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Create multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: shavenyak on Jul 09, '04 10:16:52AM

I don't think it's the format. I've ripped albums to Apple Lossless and then burned to CD (with 0 track gap), and the resulting CD is seamless. I think the problem is just on playback. Apple could probably fix this by having iTunes buffer the first couple seconds of the next song to be played in a playlist.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: hondo77 on Jun 25, '04 11:47:24AM
Why don't you just rip the album twice: once with all the tracks separate and another time with all the tracks joined? I've done this and it's much simpler and results in smaller files.

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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: pediddle on Jun 25, '04 02:00:04PM

I think the point is that ripping it twice uses twice as much space. This can add up on a laptop or ipod.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: questor on Jun 28, '04 12:14:24PM

And by copying the full-length file, you're using FOURTEEN times as much disk space (given the thirteen tracks the original poster specified). Setting the start/end times doesn't affect the size of the file; it just causes the playback to start at the specified point rather than the beginning, and causes it to end after the specified duration. (If it did truncate the file, you'd have to re-rip it to move the start earlier or the end later, right?) And any time savings you're getting from only ripping the disc once is overwhelmed by the amount of time you spend playing the files, fiddling with the start/end times. The previous poster is right; it's better to just rip the disc twice, once all joined together and once as individual tracks (or smaller joined pieces). I've done that with a different Floyd disc, Dark Side of the Moon...



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: lstewart on Jun 28, '04 04:32:42PM

questor... I think it may be you who missed the point of the original hint. When you save the file from Quicktime Pro, it is actually just saving a small QuickTime .mov file (a few Kbytes) that references the original, full-length rip (still in MP3). You're making 14 copies of this small file, and setting the start/stop times on each of them. So in actuality it does save a lot of disk space.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: galaher on Jun 25, '04 06:38:11PM

This is cool because I have purchased a Multimedia DVD that is mostly music (Zappa Halloween). I don't own a DVD player aside from my computer but would like to play this on my stereo, or on my wife's old iMac that doesn't play DVD's. I couldn't figure out a way to 'capture' the music until I used WireTap to record a hugh one-track file. Unless any one has a better idea then Wiretap for getting my audio dvd onto iTunes, I'll try playing with this hint.



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DVD audio capturing
Authored by: shavenyak on Jul 09, '04 10:04:00AM

I'm not sure how you'd do it on Mac, but there are plenty of shareware PC programs that can demux the audio off a DVD and save as .WAV files. DVD Decrypter is the one I use. It might be possible to run them in Virtual PC or something, or there's likely to be a Mac program to do the same thing.

I wish I could be more helpful, but I don't have a Mac yet. I'm just here to learn, and to pick up whatever iTunes hints apply in Windows. :)



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: Ross L on Jun 25, '04 01:03:37PM

In response to wondering about whether it will work in the regular QuickTime Player, it won't. There is no Save As... menu item on the regular QuickTime Player. Oh well, let's all pay $30 cuz we feel like it. :)

---
Fake but we wish it was true fact: Mac in some foreign language means holy.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: Anonymous on Jun 28, '04 02:23:04PM
Fake but we wish it was true fact: Mac in some foreign language means holy.

In Gaelic, it means "son of ..."

So, your Mac could be described as "Son of Intosh". W00t.

---
cm

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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: yoel on Jun 25, '04 01:22:52PM

This is exactly what .cue files are for. Apple needs to add support for them to iTunes, so that it isn't necessary to go through this stupidly complicated process for every album with gapless tracks.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: shavenyak on Jul 09, '04 10:09:43AM

Nah, they just need to fix iTunes and the iPod so that they play gaplessly. AAC and Lossless files are correctly encoded so that it should be possible to play them seamlessly. MP3 is a different matter, but there are plenty of other MP3 players that will skip over the silent part of the last block to faciliatate seamless play. Then you have the best of both worlds: individual files for each song which are easily taggable and portable, plus gapless play for Pink Floyd.

I thought .cue files were great, too, until I realized what a pain it is to deal with getting one song and putting it on a compilation disc or sending an MP3 of it to a friend.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: DoctorJ on Oct 05, '06 08:29:24AM

I've been given an hour long .mp3 and a .cue file. What program do i use to change these into regular length songs? A linux app would be okeh, as well.

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Using a rusty Amiga 4000T & a shiny Mac PowerBook G4



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One thing to keep in mind about long tracks
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Jun 25, '04 02:08:18PM

Anytime you have an audio file that is either longer in length, or larger in size than the iPod's RAM buffer will hold, you force the iPod to read this file off its hard drive, which will cause the battery to drain much faster. It could also cause the iPod to skip.
 
What a lot of people don't understand is that the iPod does not stream audio off its hard drive, but instead reads the file into RAM, and plays it from that. If the file is too large to load into RAM, it only loads part of that file, and then has to access the hard drive.

Personally I just live with the small pause as the iPod loads the next track.



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One thing to keep in mind about long tracks
Authored by: marky on Jun 25, '04 11:49:29PM

This is a good point. However, if you are only playing 5 minutes of a 60 minute track will the iPod still need to load the entire track? Just wondering.

---
Forgive the self promotion...

Add the AboveCalifornia Sherlock channel!
sherlock://www.AboveCalifornia.com/sherlock/SherlockChannel.xml?action=add



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One thing to keep in mind about long tracks
Authored by: nat5an on Jun 27, '04 03:40:49PM

In my experience, the iPod loads as much into RAM as it possibly can to minimize the amount of time it has to spin the hard drive. It seems to load all of the current song (or as much as it can), and then the next few songs that will be played (if there's space available), assuming no user interference. Thus you may see that if you skip a song or two, the next song will start playing immediately, but if you skip several songs, you'll have to wait for the song to be loaded into RAM. Of course this effect will vary greatly with the size of the audio files.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: rduncan10 on Jun 25, '04 07:28:27PM

You can use Garage Band to do this too (I think you need the update that has been posted in Software Update to do this). Open Garage Band and open the CD in a Finder window and drag the aiff files to Garage Band. Then edit away. When you are done, export the result to iTunes (on the File menu).

Garage Band seems to have some kind of lengh limit, so you won't see the end of the song, though it is there. To get around this, I spilt the track and drag the end of it down to the next track. You can then turn the tracks on and off to export each individually to iTunes.

I don't know if the aiff file over-rides the beat and key settings on the Garage Band file, but then I'm about as musical as a bagpipe so I wouldn't know if it did.

Rob Duncan



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Much easier solution using unix links
Authored by: magir on Jun 26, '04 04:31:50PM

I read the hint and I though "this is surely an application of unix hard links". Simply go to the terminal and issue "ln cd.mp3 trackX.mp3" several times and import all created files into itunes. Then you use get info within iTunes to set the track start and stop times. As it seems, iTunes saves this information in its internal database and not within the mp3 file. I guess when this information is synched with an iPod the file is created twice on the iPod and thus takes up more space there. This could be circumvented by created hard links in the iPod itself but I'm not sure whether the iPod firmware is capable of handling hardlins, softlinks or aliases.



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Much easier solution using unix links
Authored by: alys on Jun 26, '04 10:34:02PM

That's an interesting idea so I tried it out, but it has disadvantages. It WILL result in the track appearing twice in iTunes (or more often if you run the ln command more than once), and you CAN set the start and end times separately for each copy (and also the ratings), but you can't set separate track names (or artists, albums, etc). If you change the track name on one copy of the track, it will immediately be changed on all the other copies. You won't see the change in the other copies immediately, because the track listing screen doesn't refresh itself automatically, but if you go into the info window for any of the other copies, you'll see the track name has changed.

This is because the track name (and artist, album, etc) is stored in the file itself, in the ID3 tags. The ln command does not make a new, separate file -- instead it causes the original file to "appear" twice -- so when you change one "copy" of the file, then other "copy" changes automatically. The only thing that can be different between the two "copies" of the file can be the file name.

The start and end times and the rating can be different for the "copies" when set in iTunes because they are stored in iTunes database (as the poster said), not in the files themselves. However since you can't tell the difference between the "copies" of the file (other than by going into the file info to check the start and end times), using ln probably is not useful for this. I suppose you could change the rating of each "copy", but that only works if you have no more than five "copies" of the file.



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Much easier solution using unix links
Authored by: secahtah on Jul 31, '04 06:09:15PM

It seems that Techno/Trance/etc CDs are affected by this as well. This has been my only real gripe about iTunes is that it simply isn't able to handle the crossfading of tracks. The DJs mix the tracks together and there is a really nice flow from one song to the next - in iTunes, if you turn off the pause between tracks, you can still hear a blatent pause that disrupts the transition between tracks. If you try to crossfade it, it also ruins the continuity because the DJ has already crossfaded it.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: rockman2023 on Jun 27, '04 12:50:02PM

There's once downside to playing .mov files in iTunes.
When you try to increase the Preamp in the Equalizer, there is no increase in the sound's volume. For example, if you find that the volume is too low, even at it's max, there's no way to increase the Preamp with .mov files. It works fine with mp3s.



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Ceate multiple tracks from single MP3 files
Authored by: amarillo on Jun 28, '04 05:36:05PM

You can use iMovie to a similar effect. Drag the audio file into the time line area, then cut the file up as necessary. Export to Quicktime to create a .mov and add to iTunes. I can't comment about the quality, but the process is relatively painless and most of all free.



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