If you have lower capacity iPod like the 1GB nano, this trick will help you stuff more music and podcasts into your MP3 player.

You have a large collection of MP3 music and audio-video podcasts on your hard-drive that you want to copy to the iPod or burn them onto a CD disk using iTunes.

But before you plugin the iPod to your computer and transfer the music collection, you may easily cut out all the long silences, crowd applause and all the other boring intros / outros from the songs that will otherwise occupy precious space on your iPod drive. Now what is the most effective way to do this?

Use iTunes to Trim Unwanted Portions from Songs and Podcasts

For editing songs, you can either use any of the MP3 cutter software or your favorite iTunes which employs non-destructive editing meaning the original song file will not be modified though the unwanted portions are still removed from the music file that will be copied to your iPod or CD.

Here's how you do it. Play the song in iTunes from beginning, pause where the boring intro ends and note the time. Now skip the playhead to the location where the unwanted outro begins and note this time as well. [see red arrows in the iTunes screenshot above]

Next, we'll instruct iTunes to copy just the music between the specific time period and skip the rest. Right click the song -> Get Info -> Options. Enter the Start Time and End Time that we noted above. Click OK.

When you transfer this to the iPod, iTunes will remember your preferences. If you want to permanently edit the song, right-click the song again in the iTunes playlist and select "Convert selection to AAC" - it will appear as a new song in the same playlist.