If you've ever listened to a live Phish album or a Pink Floyd album or The Beatles' Abbey Road album, or many classical albums or Jackson Browne's two classic songs 'The Load Out' and 'Stay,' you'll quickly realize that many many artists want their music tracks to flow into each other, and not play as separate discrete songs. In fact, it can be downright annoying when trying to listen to these songs if they aren't flowing together properly.
iTunes seems to give you the ability to solve this problem, but it really doesn't. The major problem with iTunes' Advanced: Join Tracks feature is that it only works if you've inserted a CD and you haven't imported the songs from that CD yet. The crazy thing is that it doesn't work if you've just purchased an album from the iTunes Music Store. Just purchased Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon from the iTunes Music Store? Sorry, you are out of luck!
Or what if you've already imported the songs into your music library, and you just discovered that you need to join some of the tracks? Apple says Sorry, sucker! You're out of luck again! This is one of the biggest long-standing flaws with iTunes. While Apple adds video and podcasts and new interfaces to iTunes, they simply won't give you the ability to join tracks once you've imported them into your library.
Unless, of course, you want to burn a CD and then re-import it again -- thus losing some audio quality along the way. Well, that's actually the only way to do it if you've purchased songs from the iTunes Music Store, because this hint doesn't work with protected songs. The few commercial AppleScripts that were available for this task of joining unprotected tracks no longer work -- they seem to have been broken back in iTunes 4.x or 5.x. But if you have Roxio Toast Titanium installed on your machine, you can join unprotected tracks yourself by simulating a disc burn. Simply take these steps:
This script will enable you to join the files of selected iTunes tracks together with Quick Time Pro and export them as a single AAC file/track. Optionally, with Apple's Chapter Tool application installed, it will create a "chapterized" audio file of the exported AAC file.As noted, you'll need QuickTime Pro, and probably want the Chapter Tool (download linked on this page). The result should be a single, gapless AAC file on your desktop, complete with chapter markers. Unfortunately, as you might expect, it will not work with protected songs from the store, but will handle any other format.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20051210085622131