the bits

Apple’s iPods are still broken for live or classical music, and concept albums. The problem is that the iPod can’t deal with tracks that are supposed to have no gap between them (Dark Side of the Moon, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, pretty much any live recording…). This is a well documented problem.

The best solution until recently is to rip all the tracks from the CD into a single file. You get no unexpected track gaps this way, but you also get no individual track access or track info.

With the advent of audio books and podcasts, Apple has released a little app called Chapter Tool that lets you create an AAC file with chapter markers. This way, you preserve individual track names and info, and the ability to go to a specific track.

The trouble is that using Chapter Tool is kind of a pita. I mean, who wants to hand-write an XML file with track names and durations? Blegh. Sounds like a great task for an enterprising AppleScript developer.

Enger Doug Adams, of dougscripts.com. He’s got an awesome little script called Join Together that does all the heavy lifting. Select a bunch of tracks in iTunes and invoke the script, and you’ll end up with a single AAC file that includes all the tracks and chapter markers.

There are a couple caveats. First of all, be sure to start with tracks in a lossless format. I used Apple Lossless, but I imagine that AIFF would work also (though I didn’t try). One reason for this is that mp3 uses a fixed frame size, and so will almost always leave empty space at the end of the last frame. Modern mp3 encoders and decoders can compensate for this to some degree (iPod does not, and iTunes does it poorly in my opinion).

The second caveat is that even though you end up with a chapterized file, it’s still one large file. This means that random access to the tracks in the file is not possible in party shuffle or ‘regular old shuffle’ mode. It is trivial to manually play the track and then jump to the desired chapter using the chapter menu that appears when playing chapterized tracks:

click it good