I’ve been using iTunes ever since the iPod Mini, remember those? It’s been a number of years and I only recently discovered how to enable the crossfade transition effect in iTunes that I was accustomed to in Winamp (wow I have not said that word in a long time)! I’m not sure if I just overlooked it or perhaps it was a new feature that only came out in the recent versions of iTunes, but nevertheless it’s good to not hear the silence between songs. It makes me feel like I’ve got a personal DJ playing exactly the tunes I like.

Enabling iTunes crossfading is very simple. In the menu bar click Edit, then Preferences. From there navigate to the second tab Playback and you’ll get this:

Check the “Crossfade Songs” box and you’re set! You can tweak the number of seconds the crossfading will overlap between songs, but I left it at the default value and it’s worked out great. While you’re at it, you may also want to check the “Sound Check” option. What this does is normalize the volume on all your MP3 tracks so they all play at the same sound level. This is good if you’ve got tracks from different sources and encodings. Some may be really quiet while others may be too loud. Sound Check will help make the difference less noticeable. One big warning before you check that box though: iTunes will have to sift through your entire library to enable this feature so plan on leaving your computer on for a couple hours depending on how large your library is. My 40GB collection took one whole night.