I love Please Take Me Home from blink-182‘s “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket“. It’s a great song with one glaring problem: For some ridiculous reason they decided to pull a Nirvana on it and extend the track length of this 3:03 song to 6:06. So when I am listening to my iPod in shuffle mode (which is just about the only way I ever listen to iPod or iTunes), there’s three minutes and three seconds of dead air. Annoying. Very annoying.
I’m a computer geek. I really am. I am an ultra-nerd of the highest order. But I loathe graphics-editing, video-editing, and audio-editing. I don’t know why. I just do. Could I figure it out? Yes. Of course. I know there are programs that I could use to manually strip dead space from the ends of songs. Hell, I could probably use a hex editor and just delete the bytes from the actual mp3 file. But that’s annoying, too.
It just so happens that Apple was thinking, I can only assume, of me and my ilk when their coders sat down to develop iTunes.
Open iTunes. Browse your way to Please Take Me Home. Right-click it. Select “Get Info”. Go to the “Options” tab. Put a check in the “Stop Time” checkbox. Change the “Stop Time” value to 3:03. Done.
Brilliant.
“Apple was thinking, I can only assume, of me and my ilk…”
“Ilk” is indeed a tremendous word. I re-read the post for nothing other than to admire it in context one more time. Well done, Cotter.