The Sound of Silence

Apple have just released iTunes 7 and associated firmware updates to the iPod. There's lots of shiny bells and whistles to coo over but one small feature has filled me with joy. Finally I have a little less silence in my life. A few precious moments of quiet have been eradicated, and boy were those silences annoying me. It used to be the case that no matter how your CD was structured when you ripped it into iTunes you'd get little pauses between the songs. Tiny little pauses, much shorter than a second, but on live albums or albums where the tracks run together like "Dark Side of the Moon", "Smile" or most opera it was infuriating.

I tried everything, from getting the track timing on the CD to a thousand of a second's accuracy and trying to make the ripped track conform to that to trying to mix them together by ear; neither did any good. Finally I gave up in frustration and just didn't really listen to the album much (except on CD) and sulked. But now all my weird German electro and Verdi's Requiem and all my live albums are restored to me. Joy.

I'm surprised it's taken them this long, I mean Stevie J's of a generation that I'd have thought would have ripped "Dark Side of the Moon" immediately upon getting the iPod out of Apple's R and D department, but perhaps he's had his own special version for ages and only now do we mere mortals get to hear our music as it's supposed to be.