Time between songs

Question

My grandson, not particularly noted for his patience, claims his first generation shuffle doesn't work properly. In tolerance only a loving grandfather can exhibit I have played his music (which I neither like nor understand) for several hours in both modes and checked out the forward and back buttons. All seems to be working satisfactorily. THE QUESTION: the time BETWEEN selections varies between three or four seconds to 15 or 20 seconds and can be as much as 90 seconds. Is this normal? If not, is there a remedy? My understanding is that some songs have been downloaded from iTunes and some have been ripped from CDs.
Dell Dimension 4550   Windows XP  

Answer 1

I don't think you can crossfade songs on a shuffle--the songs are loaded exactly as they are ripped. (You can crossfade in iTunes to reduce/eliminate silence between tracks.)
Many songs have extra space at either the beginning or end of them. 90 seconds sounds a bit long--but believe it or not I once discovered a 17 minute song on my playlist. I knew the song didn't go on forever, so I checked it out. It turns out it was the last song on the album and when the album was cut the song was never ended--the track just ran until the end of the CD (the song itself was only about 4 minutes).
Your grandson should note some of the songs that display these unusual gaps between tracks and then look at the actual song file.
If you have sound editing software, you can cut off the dead space at the beginning or end of songs. It's pretty easy to do this because the songs display as sound waves--and dead space is just a straight line. You can safely snip off the straight lines, re-save the sound file, re-import into iTunes and the problem will be solved.
Or, you can live with the space between tracks knowing there's not much you can do to change it within iTunes.
The only other option is for you or your grandson to burn a CD of songs with no tracks--so it will re-import as one long track. There won't be any spaces, but there won't be any option to shuffle the music either, because it will look like one song to iTunes.