TECHNOLOGY WORKS. TECHNOLOGY...DELIVERS.

For some time now, a sizable percentage of the promo CDs I receive have been getting short shrift, because I do most of my music listening on my iPod. And in order to foil wily file-sharers (of which I am not one), record companies have been encoding their promo CDs as 99 tracks rather than 10 or 12 or however many songs the album in question actually contains. When you try and suck a song that's broken into 10 chunks into your iPod, you get a little one-second break, just long enough to annoy the hell out of you and totally break your rockin'-trance, between the chunks. So a lot of albums that would ordinarily have gotten a dozen listens have gotten at most one or two, because hearing them broken up that way is just too damn annoying.

Well, at the Meshuggah show Friday night, a buddy of mine pointed out that iTunes has this feature called "Join CD Tracks." It does what it says it does - it splices all these tiny tracks together, seamlessly, so you've got a whole song again. I don't wanna get all Mac-nerd here, but I got a tech stiffy when I spotted this feature on the "Advanced" menu on Saturday morning.

Needless to say, I immediately gathered up all those annoying promos (and a few DJ mix-discs that suffer from the same problem), and imported 'em all. So now, at last, I can fully enjoy the following fine, fine records:

Arch Enemy, Doomsday Machine
God Forbid, IV: Constitution Of Treason
Richie Hawtin, Decks, EFX & 909 and DE9: Closer To The Edit
Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz, We Run The South
Mistress, In Disgust We Trust
Origin, Echoes Of Decimation
The Red Chord, Clients
Various Artists, The Kings Of House

Three of these discs (Arch Enemy, God Forbid, and Origin) now have a significantly better chance of making my year-end Top Ten list than they did before this past weekend. Thanks, iTunes!

(Yes, I know I'm the last person in the world to discover this. That knowledge tempers my joy not one jot.)