[G4] Why I love my Mac

[Kevin Willis]

	This is a story about a small situation I was able to solve thanks to 
my Mac (Gigabit G4/400 Sonnet 1 Ghz upgrade).   I am probably the least 
advanced user on these lists, but I seemed like a freakin' genius in my 
house full of PC users.

	My step son has a band and just finished recording his third album.  I 
ripped the master CD with iTunes in order to make copies for them to 
sell.  I have a smart playlist with all of their songs in it.  My wife 
wanted a CD with all three albums on it.  The only problem was that the 
total playing time of all three combined was about 86 minutes.  6 
minutes too long for a CD-R.  I noticed that the last track on their 
last album was about 15 minutes long.  It turns out that it was a three 
minute song with about a 9 minute pause and a three minute "hidden 
track".  So, the challenge was to figure out a way to split the one 
track into the two songs and get rid of the dead air.

	The first thing I did was make a copy of the song in case I messed up. 
  After that, I opened iMovie and clicked on the audio tab.  That 
brought up a list of my iTunes library.  I located the track and 
dragged it to the clip section.  I found a view option that showed the 
sound waves from the song.  That allowed me to "see" the first song, 
the dead air, and the second song.  I clipped and highlighted from 
right after the first song all the way to the end of the track and cut 
that section out.  I saved the file as a .mov file to my desktop.  I 
didn't see any other save options in iMovie to choose from.  I repeated 
the process but eliminated the first song and the dead air leaving just 
the second song.  I saved that file to my desktop as well.

	After managing to separate the 2 songs, I opened Toast and selected 
"Music" CD.  I dragged the 2 files in to Toast which converted them to 
music files.  I then burned the 2 songs to a CD.  Finally, I imported 
the 2 songs from the CD into my iTunes folder.  Now I have all three 
albums ready to burn to CD.  I'm sure this all old hat to most of you, 
but it was pretty cool for me to strut around the house for a day "King 
of the Digital World".

	I just wanted to share the experience with ya'll.  Thanks for reading 
this.

	
Thanks--

Kevin