In my search of an ellusive iTunes feature I encountered the "Remember Playback Position" flag under song options. Basically you can use this to save your position in an audio book or podcast if you switch to listen to something else. Supposedly this functionality will cary over to the iPod if it's new enough.

And now for the feature that doesn't exist as much as I'd like. Right above the feature I just mentioned on the options page you can specify the start and stop time. This is cool. I use this to avoid dead air (I was a radio engineer/dj in college). However, I'd love to see this extended just a bit. I'll use Green Day as an example.

The iTunes version of the American Idiot album has 9 tracks for 13 songs. 4 of the tracks have 2 songs each. Now it'd be cool if I could use the 'start and stop time' feature to create an 'alias song' so that I could add 'Holiday' and 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' to playlists individually.

This would also be useful for those random 'hidden' tracks, like at the end of 'Smash' (The Offspring) or 'Jagged Little Pill' (Alanis morissette). In my playlist right now, the former is just truncated at the end of the first song, but I REALLY like the second song on the later, so I went through the trouble of creating 2 mp3's out of the original, giving me 13 tracks. If you haven't listened to the Acoustic Jagged Little Pill, do so. summary:

Remember Playback Position = good.
Song Aliases = needed (also need a better name, I should coin one -- we should just call them Edits^TM)

p.s. Edits^TM would also let me set more than one equilizer preset for a song or if combined with 'grouping' different presets for different sections of a song. The wild part of all of this is that it'd all be meta data, so multiple Edits^TM of a given song wouldn't take up much more diskspace than just having the original.

am i crazy, or is this a neat idea? or both?