Looking for Win-based sound-editing software to work with AAC files

Question

Hi, everyone.
I'm a part-time indoor-cycling instructor. I create iTunes playlists to fit a certain types of "rides," transfer the lists to my iPod, then hook the player to the club's stereo system. Very slick.
But not slick enough. There are some songs I don't want to play all the way through; I want to use only isolated segments of certain songs. And I want to employ crossfade. When cycling, it's important to keep the music coming; dead spots are energy killers. I want to stich in some stray bits of oddball audio, such as funny snippets of movie dialog and other nonsense, to keep the mood light. And I'm looking for a way to more precisely control track-to-track playback volume.
I know I can isolate a segment of a song file by using the "start time" and "stop time" adjustments on the "options" tab of a song file's "get info" settings within iTunes. But I want to do more than that. Sometimes I want to play :20 of a song at one part of the ride, and :40 of the same song later in the ride, and I don't want to have to make a renamed copy of the song file to make it happen.
I'm thinking what I need is sound-editing software. I want to create, say, a 60-minute playlist in iTunes, export copies (not the originals) of the songs in that playlist to the sound-editing platform, do my editing and create a single, 60-minute file that I can then load into iTunes and thus, transfer to my iPod. When I hook the 'pod up to the club's stereo, I would then play the single 60-minute "song" instead of the 60-minute playlist.
And of course, I want to do it really cheaply, on a PC running iTunes for Windows. How's that for a challenge?
If I had a Mac, I probably could use SoundStudio to do this, because it imports AAC files.
What I need is a Windows-based editing platform that can import AAC files. If you know of such an animal, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
If there is no such animal, here's what I think I'll have to do:
1. Pluck song files from my iTunes music folder
2. Create a CD containing mp3 copies of those songs
3. Send those mp3 copies into the editing software
4. Stitch the songs together in the editing software into a single file
5. Export that file as a single mp3 file
6. Have iTunes convert that mp3 file to mp4.
Right? Or wrong? If anyone has advice, I'm all ears.

Answer 1

The reason why I posted here was to hopefully find someone who has actually done this before rather than have someone throw packages at me that I can find on Google on my own.
There are a number of SMS gateways out there, but I have not used any of them. Setting up some of them is a very time consuming process and I was hoping to get a heads up on one that that some else had used in the Solaris 10 x86 environment within a zone.
I already have a working email version of this process which I put together very quickly, but using SMS would be a much better process for the techs out in the field.
I won't have the actual GSM Modem in hand until Monday or Tuesday and am doing some preliminary work so that I can hit the ground running when it shows up.
Thanks for your suggestions though.