There are some CDs where the music all segues together, and you may not want to listen to individual tracks. These may be DJ mixes, operas, or other types of music. One example is Dysnomia, by Dawn of Midi, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. It’s a 46-minute piece of jazz, cut into nine tracks, but you should really listen to the whole thing in order.
Fortunately, you can rip a CD as a single track using iTunes, so you won’t get individual tracks in shuffle mode, and so it’s easier to listen to the whole thing. Here’s how.
Insert a CD into your optical drive, and select it in iTunes. Click Command-A (or Control-A on Windows) to select all the tracks. Next, click the Options button near the top-right of the iTunes window, and choose Join Tracks.
iTunes will display a sort of bracket to the left of all the tracks showing that they are joined. Click Import to rip the CD, and you’ll find that it shows up in your iTunes library as a single track.
If you’ve already ripped a CD, you can use Doug Adams’ $5 Join Together, which combines any group of tracks – even more than a single album’s worth – into one long file. This is designed mostly for audiobooks, but you can also use it to join music tracks.