Seemless song transitions on CD

Joe I have done this on an album I produced recently. Firstly any tracks that need to flow need to be created (mixed) individually. Bearing in mind that endings of one track are flowing into beginnings of another. Watch out for keys as well here if you want things to go well tonally. eg if you are hearing two tracks at once for any amount of time do you want to hear one in C and the other in C#! (unless you are aiming for such dissonance)

I then created a mastering session and it was here that I did the joins. This did not happen with every track on the album but it could. I then mastered the group of tracks as one complete track. eg 3 tracks in a row did a segue. This can be a bit tricky as you might have to automate the mastering from track to track.

So now I have a big block of three tracks. I then opened this up in Cool Edit Pro and cut the three tracks up at the points I wanted the track ID's to be. You have to allow for the fact that someone might want to jump to the middle track of the group. All you have to do is make sure that where you make the cut the audio file is going through a zero crossing point. So it may mean a bit of zooming in to get it right.

Then you simply burn the master CD with those three tracks in a row (without any silence in between obviously) They will all play smoothly going from one to other without a hitch but you can still jump to the ID's if you need to. eg jump to the middle one if you want.

Hope that helps. It is quite a nice effect for sure. The only thing that is hard is getting the mastering to work over all the tracks in the group and as I said earlier automating that is the best way to go.

It depends how the tracks flow as well. I had tracks still ending as new ones started and you could still hear the previous one ending while the new one kicked in and if this is the case when the new one kicks in it is usually a quiter start while the previous track is still ending.

As per GuitarHacker and Jeff ...

I've done this a lot, with CDA, CD Architect; another reasonable standard for seemlessly fading tracks and making red book CDs. 

(Very easy, popular, and user friendly)

(SoundForge has CDA bundled with it, IIRC.)

Yeah, I had several songs I wanted to blend together, but they were in different keys & time signatures.

So, I imported each of the mixed, 24-bit wavs into a blank project, slid them to where I roughly wanted them, then composed a short synth-based seque to join them up - nudged each bit until they were EXACTLY where I wanted, then dumped the whole thing out into CD Architect.

In CDA, I then inserted track markers where I wanted the next song to begin and burnt it to CD.

Another good example of an album created like this is Marillion's Misplaced Childhood.