Creating pauses between tracks in iTunes

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Haydn · #1 Post by **Haydn** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 12:32 pm

I currently use iTunes for DJing (and as a personal music player at home). The trouble is, especially when DJing, some tracks run right until the end, so sometimes songs effectively run straight into each other. This is a nuisance when DJing. And it's very difficult to pause a song half a second before it ends.

Does anyone know a simple way of selectively adding a few seconds of silence on to some tracks? I use a Mac, and would like a solution that is cheap and simple

penguin · #2 Post by **penguin** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 5:54 am

Hmmm, JRiver has a setting that lets you do this but I can't recall anything similar in Itunes.

Some people have made up some mp3 tracks of silence for this purpose which you can que up. There should be something like this floating around the interwebz somewhere.

Surreal · #3 Post by **Surreal** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 10:43 am

Best I can think of is to just use an editor and add in silence to the end of the mp3.

penguin wrote:Hmmm, JRiver has a setting that lets you do this but I can't recall anything similar in Itunes.

You can do that for individual songs? I can only find the setting that does it for all.

penguin · #4 Post by **penguin** » Tue Oct 14, 2008 2:28 am

Not for individual songs though if you were really nuts you could set up some crazy thing with different settings in a number of zones to achieve different pauses with different songs.

PhilShapiro · #5 Post by **PhilShapiro** » Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:37 pm

For editing mp3s (and AACs) on a Mac I've heard good things about Fission, from Rogue Amoeba: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/

It's pretty cheap ($32) and is supposed to be very easy to use. It edits the encoded files directly without encoding/decoding so there's no (additional

) loss in audio quality.

Way back when I DJ'd from mp3s (back in 2001!) I had a few 1/2/3 second silent mp3s tracks I'd use to insert pauses between tracks. It worked but it was not very elegant...

Haydn · #6 Post by **Haydn** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 6:20 am

PhilShapiro wrote:For editing mp3s (and AACs) on a Mac I've heard good things about Fission, from Rogue Amoeba: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/

It's pretty cheap ($32) and is supposed to be very easy to use. It edits the encoded files directly without encoding/decoding so there's no (additional ) loss in audio quality.

Looks great - thanks

PhilShapiro wrote:Way back when I DJ'd from mp3s (back in 2001!) ...

So what do you use for DJing now?

Mr Awesomer · #7 Post by **Mr Awesomer** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 10:29 am

Do you have that crossover option turned on or something? I use iTunes as well and have never had an issue with the next song playing to soon.

Haydn · #8 Post by **Haydn** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 4:30 pm

Mr Awesomer wrote:Do you have that crossover option turned on or something? I use iTunes as well and have never had an issue with the next song playing to soon.

No. Crossfade Playback is 'off'. The problem is some tracks run right until the end, which doesn't leave enough space between songs. I think an MP3 editor might be the answer, so I can add a few seconds slience at the end of some songs.

Surreal · #9 Post by **Surreal** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 4:48 pm

I remember itunes had the ability to set the start and stop time for individual songs. Is it possible to set the end time beyond the length of the song?

Haydn · #10 Post by **Haydn** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 5:08 pm

Surreal wrote:I remember itunes had the ability to set the start and stop time for individual songs. Is it possible to set the end time beyond the length of the song?

Good idea. Just tried it - it didn't work.

Haydn · #11 Post by **Haydn** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 10:14 am

PhilShapiro wrote:For editing mp3s (and AACs) on a Mac I've heard good things about Fission, from Rogue Amoeba: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/

It's pretty cheap ($32) and is supposed to be very easy to use. It edits the encoded files directly without encoding/decoding so there's no (additional ) loss in audio quality.

I've just bought this after trying the free demo. Uncluttered and easy to use. It's excellent

PhilShapiro · #12 Post by **PhilShapiro** » Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:22 am

Haydn wrote:So what do you use for DJing now?

CDs. Someday, when I have the $$ and the time, I plan to move to a laptop. DJ'ing is just a once-in-a-while hobby for me these days though.

I started out dj'ing mp3s (on a PJB-100) but didn't have a way to preview tracks, so I switched to CDs. And once I got used to previewing I didn't want to go back.

Glad to hear Fission worked for you.

Haydn · #13 Post by **Haydn** » Sun Nov 02, 2008 6:46 am

The latest version 1.6 of Fission for the Mac has a new feature 'Insert Silence" which makes this pretty easy -

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2008/10/ ... ringtones/