Hello everybody,

I have a non-filemaker question that someone may have the answer to since there are a lot of Mac fans here.

I got an iPod Nano for Father's day and I really like it. It was replacing a very old MP3 player that only had a couple hundred meg memory so the improvement in UI and capacity is really striking.

Here's the problem. Most of the songs any any given album are truly independent of each other. By this I mean that the iPod song shuffle can be turned on and the mix sounds good. But there are some songs on some albums that are intended to be played sequentially. If the songs are played out of sequence it becomes really disjointed and it sounds as though the beginning and end of the songs are missing.

For instance on Chicago II there is a 13 minute sequence called "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon" which is a compilation of 7 different songs. When played in order it is an impressive work but when played randomly (shuffled) it is odd at best. During live concerts Chicago always plays the set in the proper sequence.

Anyway I'm wondering if there is any way to group certain songs so that they always play as a group when the shuffle is turned on?

Yes & No....

No, there is not functionality in iTunes or the iPod that will automatically let you do that.

Yes, you can make it do that by making your own custom song that is a compilation of the 7 songs in a row.

Without Sound editing software you can probably do it in Quicktime Player (believe it or not :. This will work for actual mp3's not for the protected AAC format.

1) Open Quicktime Player

2) Open the 1st song (of 7)

3) Edit menu "Select All" (ctl-A)

4) Edit menu "Copy" (ctl-C)

5) File menu "New Player"

6) Edit menu "Paste" (ctl-V) - this adds it to the end of the last one

7) Open next song

8) Repeat 2-6 until you have all songs completed (not 5 of course, just select the Untitled player)

9) Save file (it will be a .mov file)

10) in iTunes select File menu "Add To Library..." and select the new mov file

11) now that it's in iTunes, it'll still be in the mov format, so after finding the file (sort Library by Name) and clicking once on it to select it, select Advanced menu "Convert Selection to MP3"

12) now you can delete the original mov format file

Hopefully I explained this well enough. Should work like a charm.

Thanks Leland,

I'm surprised that such a workaround is necessary. I would have expected iTunes to be able to handle this situation because it seems to be a really rich application. Maybe songs from today's artists are more independent so this doesn't bother other people but I have a fair number of albums from the past where this sequencing issue is a problem.

Anyway, your workaround involves more horsing-around than I'm ready for but I appreciate your clear explanation.

Thanks!

One solution would be to put the songs that need to play in order in their own playlist, and shuffle-able songs in another playlist.

Or you could try this: Join Together

Thanks for the tip Mr. Fitch but that won't work for me because it needs OSX 10.4 or better and I'm running OS XP.

The other bad news is that since I made my original post, the iPod bit-the-dust so it's on the way to the repair shop.

I'm sure you can find plenty of alternatives if you google for "join mp3" or "merge mp3". A word of warning: .mp3 is a lossy compression scheme. Uncompressing two files, splicing them together and re-encoding the result to a new .mp3 file compounds the losses and can reduce the (already marginal) quality of .mp3 to below acceptable. Look for a package that can join two compressed streams directly (hopefully without earbuds/eardrum shattering clicks at the seam).

IIRC, iTunes allows you to join selected tracks during the initial import from CD too.