Why does iTunes sometimes refuse to burn a 78:30 playlist?!?

Question

Most of the time iTunes 6 will burn a 79:30 playlist to an 80-minute CD-R with no fuss. (That's a real 79:30 or 79:40 or even 79:55, not the list of times as iTunes displays them to the whole second. I monitor the time precisely using the Info/Options panel for each track.)
But once in a while, iTunes decides a playlist is too long even when it's not, like when it is really 78:30. This happens erratically. But when it does continue to give me this message, no amount of chopping time off each track seems to matter. (I use Peak to edit out "dead air" at the end. Doing this to 20 tracks can cut over a minute from the total time of a playlist.) It will only burn to one CD if I remove a whole track.
I just tested one case where it burned 75:50 but not the last track, which was another 2:43. I rebuilt the playlist one track at a time with a new name, but no cigar. I really want this particular 78:30 playlist on one CD. Can anyone help with this?

Answer 1

I would like at once to thank you for making this point again and also to say that it is just not relevant to the problem I'm having. However much space TAO takes up, at the end of the day it's accountable in the total time on the CD. I am not having a problem with iTunes failing to accept a playlist near the limit of time. When the playlist plus TAO space plus anything else adds up to under 80 minutes, iTunes will burn it.
My problem comes when I begin with a playlist of specific tracks that total a few seconds more than 80 minutes. Not incidentally, this is the result of iTunes adding from two to five seconds to each track as it imports the track using Apple Lossless Compression. As a result, a playlist that was actually shorter than 80 minutes becomes longer than 80 minutes.
Then, WITHOUT CHANGING THE TITLES, I remove 60 seconds from the total playlist time BY EDITING THOSE TITLES to make them shorter. For example, "Only the Lonely.mp4" is changed from 2:28.93 to 2:23.87.
I do this by using Peak to remove "dead air" from the end of the track. I then save the new file and substitute it for the old one in the iTunes library. I look before and after at the iTunes file info to confirm I have actually shortened the track by 5.06 seconds as far as iTunes is concerned. In my playlist the time now reads 2:23 instead of 2:28. I do this to other tracks, 10 or more times, to reduce the actual running time of the playlist by a full minute or more. The playlist is now UNDER 79 MINUTES.
But iTunes will not burn this exact playlist on one CD. IF, on the other hand, I simply change one track from my playlist to another track (with a new name) and a shorter playing time, iTunes will burn it just fine. What iTunes will not let me do is burn the exact playlist I started with, from which I have subtracted a full minute's time. I need a fix for this specific situation.