Macworld Forums: iTunes' Start and Stop Times - Macworld Forums

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While our comments were on the mend, reader M.C. sent along this comment:

>The most important reason for start and stop times is to get rid of dead air at the head and tail of songs so that the crossfade function works. As a profession soundman, and former sound editor, it is very important.

Hi! I use the start time for one song I purchased from iTunes. The recording had some annoying junk just before the beginning of the song. I chopped the first 19 seconds for it, and now it works just fine.
Message was edited by: mathogre (Removed manually added signature.)

Music recorded live: There's a wonderful live version of Sweet Jane with a few minutes of prelude. I created three versions with different start times - the whole thing, an abbreviated prelude, and only Sweet Jane itself.
Extra bits one might not like: The quacking at the end of Joe Walsh's Life's Been Good might not be to everyone's taste.
Lack of Song divisions on albums: The Toys soundtrack has a wonderful song "The Closing of the Year" and tacked right on is a song with a wildly different mood. By Stopping before the second song I can put Closing in my Christmas playlist.

I actually purchased a track from iTunes that had over a minute of silence at the end of the tune. I used the stop time to fix the problem after stumbling across the option.

It could also be helpful for those songs on albums with like ten minutes of silence before a "hidden" track. Sure, it was cute when CDs were popular, but now is just annoying.

I have a 3rd generation iPod whose software does not sync the last played time back to iTunes. If I sync and want to resume playback on my iPod where I left off, I change the start time to the time last played.

cphoffman42 said:

I used to do this. But if it's a good hidden track, I'll disassemble it with Audacity, make it a separate song, then re-import into iTunes. I want to hear it on my Shuffle, and not because I held fast-forward for 3 minutes. I also don't want to never hear it - I've lost so many play counts because I lost patience waiting for the "hidden" tracks.

how to do it to an entire playlist or multiple songs?

I noticed iTunes? start and stop times when I first started using iTunes 4. Installing music on my PC at work served as a test bed for learning iTunes before I got my new Mac. Like others here I used it to remove, or more properly force iTunes to omit during playback, extraneous material in CD tracks. Unfortunately, one of the things I noticed using that technique was that even though I meticulously set cut off points, iTunes was none too meticulous about respecting them.

Once I moved from my old Power Mac G4 Cube to my Power Mac G5, I purchased a copy of BIAS Peak for other uses and found it to be more reliable?I did not have to worry about a split second snippet from audio I did not wish to hear being erroneously played if it was removed?, but given the price of the software I would not suggest that anyone go that route; there are much less expensive options to just that end.